
Oass£BL£&2__ 
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STUDIES IN POETRY AND 
PHILOSOPHY. 



By the same Author : 
CULTURE AND RELIGION, 

IN SOME OF THEIR RELATIONS. 

NEW EDITION, WITH PREFACE FROM THIRD EDINBURGH EDITION. 

In one volume, 16mo, red cloth, gilt top, paper title, $1.25. 



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STUDIES IN POETRY AND 

PHILOSOPHY. 



BT 

J. C. SHAIRP, 

PRINCIPAL OP THE UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD, 
ST ANDREWS 

AUTHOR OP "CULTURE AND RELIGION.'' 



PII VAXES ET PHCEBO DTGJSA LOCUTL 



NEW YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. 

Camfcrfag* : &tber$tte $vt<&. 

1872. 



ft 



[Reprinted from the Second Edinburgh Edition.] 

am 

W. L. Shoemaker 
1 S '06 



tt-3Uf3 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE \ 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED U Y 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



(St 






THE RIGHT HONORABLE 

SIR JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 

THE NEPHEW OF COLERIDGE, 

THE FRIEND OF WORDSWORTH, 

THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND OF KEBLE, 

AND HIS BIOGRAPHER, 

IN WHOSE SERENE AGE AND BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER 

ANOTHER GENERATION SEES EMBODIED 

THE BEST WISDOM OF HIS POET FRIENDS. 



PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 



The Essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Keble, were, as stated in the former Preface, 
intended to be in some sort thank-offerings, — 
single stones contributed to their memorial cairns. 
Another name I feel should have followed, or 
rather have preceded these. Of Walter Scott 
and his poetry, the first poetry I knew, it was 
my wish to have said something in another essay, 
and to have added it to this series, or perhaps put 
it in the first, which would have been its proper 
place. But before this was done, his Centenary 
had come, during which so much was spoken, and 
well spoken, on the subject, that this does not 
seem the time for saying more. But if, adopting 
Wordsworth's lines, we say — 

" Blessings be with them — and eternal praise, 
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares — 
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! " 

to Walter Scott will fall a large share in that 
benediction. 

These Essays are in no sense criticisms of the 
poets they deal with, at least as that word is 
generally understood. To take the measure of 



viii PREFACE. 

these great and good men, and assign them, as 
the phrase goes, their place in literature, I would 
not try if, I could, and I could not if I would. 
Such attempts seem to me to be generally more 
pretentious than solid. Enough will have been 
done, if, by pointing to some of the sources of 
delight I found in them, others may be induced 
to study them and find the same. 

A hope was expressed that all the four Essays, 
distinct though they are in subject, might yet be 
found pervaded by a unity of thought and pur- 
pose. Of the reviewers who have noticed the 
Essays — and all whom I have read have done so 
very kindly — some have perceived no such unity, 
others have not failed to find it. One reviewer 
has so well described this thread of connection, 
that I cannot do better than give his words : — 

" His subjects — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keble, 
and the Moving Force of the Moral Life — are 
all, and not slightly, connected. All four sub- 
jects may be said to be concerned with the rela- 
tion of the divine life to that of man : Words- 
worth as the prophet of Nature, as the poet who 
interpreted the relations between the elemental 
powers of creation and the moral life of man ; 
Coleridge as the thinker, who tried to find, and 
partially found, a philosophy of the supersensual 
life ; Keble as the singer, who applied both these 
great worlds of thought so far as they fitted into 
the limitations of his own .... ecclesiastical 



PREFACE. ix 

system; and, finally, the subject of Mr. Shairp's 
last essay — the great moving force which helps 
man to become what he perceives that he ought 
to be — is one almost inevitably suggested by the 
lives of the three men who, from their different 
points of view, had all been chiefly concerned to 
discover new links between the life above and the 
life beneath." 

The reviewer in the sequel expresses a doubt 
whether I have enough insisted on " the affinity 
of Wordsworth's poetry for the great elemental 
forces both of nature and of humanity" — "the 
power which the poet displays of giving a strange 
elemental vastness to the dominant thread of 
character in either the human or the natural sub- 
ject on which he happens to be dwelling, so that 
his poem yields up not a particular man or a 
particular place, so much as the same element 
which, while belonging to either, stretches away 
into the infinite." 

Likely enough I have not dwelt on this with 
sufficient emphasis, though I certainly have always 
felt it. But where there is so much room for 
thought, it is not easy in a short essay to bring 
out every aspect of the truth with the promi- 
nence it deserves. I am therefore grateful to 
the reviewer for supplying in some measure my 
deficiency. 

The same writer then goes on to object to my 
defense of Wordsworth against being a merely 



X PREFACE. 

" subjective " poet, as it is called — one who draws 
no pictures of human character different from his 
own. Here again, though at the risk of quoting 
too largely, I must give the reviewer's own words. 
" If the terrible word c subjective ' means that 
poetry so described takes no note of external life 
and nature, it has, of course, no application to 
Wordsworth. But if it means that the individ- 
ual imagination of the poet so overbalances the 
external features of his object that the point of 
departure seems in the end to have dwindled into 
insignificance in comparison with the grandeur 
of the forces which it has called up before him, 
we should differ with Mr. Shairp. Wordsworth 
takes a scene or character, and getting it under 
the magnifying-glass of his meditative genius, he 
follows out the most striking train of associations 
it suggests to him, till he describes, not his sub- 
ject, but what his subject might have been, if 
these special influences had swept through it as 
pure and unalloyed as they swept over the heart 
of the poet who muses thereon." 

With much in this account of the matter I 
• should not disagree. To one part of it only I 
demur. However great the flood of meditative 
light which Wordsworth pours around the object 
he describes, the object itself and its external 
features are not lost or obliterated before it. No 
doubt when he describes a man, he shows us 
much more in him and his character than the 



PREFACE. xi 

man was aware of in himself. He paints from 
the side of the soul rather than that of the body, 
but the meditative associations called up are uni- 
versal and catholic, not individual or fanciful 
ones. And however powerful these are, the ex- 
ternal features given remain and agree with the 
meditations that rise out of them. They answer 
each to the other. A painter could from Words- 
worth's description paint the Cumberland Beg- 
gar, Michael, Peter Bell, and each would be a 
clear individual portrait, differing from the others 
not only in surroundings, but in every feature, 
and in the whole expression of countenance. The 
subjectivity, in short, which I denied to Words- 
worth's characters, was that which belongs to so 
many of Byron's — his Giaour, Corsair, Lara, 
Alp the Renegade, which are each so many 
pieces of himself, shadows of his own personality, 
colored by his own peculiar temperament and 
destiny. Any painter who tried to render these, 
vary their outward form and drapery as he might, 
would still paint but one expression — the same 
misanthropic scowl would sit on every brow. It 
was the absence of this kind of subjectivity — 
this projecting of his own mere individuality into 
his human characters — that I claimed for Words- 
worth. Probably enough, this may have been 
done too unconditionally ; the limits of his power 
of representation may not have been carefully 
enough denned. What I meant was, that within 



xii PREFACE. 

certain limits he truly renders other characters 
than his own; that his meditations about them 
lo not so far hide their distinctive features but 
hat you would know them if you met them on 
;he highway. 

Further to enter into these matters, and to 
define the limits of Wordsworth's power in this 
direction — for limits very definite it has — would 
require more than a Preface. His characters are 
meditative representations, not dramatic exhibi- 
tions of men. For these last no poet ever had 
less gift. 

The four Essays have all been carefully revised, 
and here and there retouched. In re-reading the 
Essay on Coleridge, I feel that in what I said but 
scant justice has been done to his poetry. But 
to reopen this subject would be to rewrite the 
essay. That I have made too little of his poetry 
may have arisen from this, that my chief intention 
at the time I wrote was to bring out the contents 
and tendency of Coleridge's philosophic specula- 
tions. 

The Essay on Keble has received larger addi- 
tions than any of the others. Indeed, it would 
have been easy to have added much more, for 
hardly a year passes but brings to light some- 
thing which gives new meaning to the character of 
Keble and " The Christian Year." But if much 
enlarged, what was meant as an essay would have 
become a book. 

St. Andrew's, December 7, 1871. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



The contents of this volume, written during 
leisure weeks of recent summers, originally ap- 
peared in the " North British Review." They 
were put together not hastily at first, and have 
since been revised, in some places retrenched, in 
more enlarged. This is true of all the papers, 
except the third, which stands now much as it 
did at first. Though each of the four Essays has 
a distinct subject of its own, it is hoped that they 
will be found to have a unity both of thought and 
purpose. The first three were written from a 
desire to acknowledge, as far as possible, a debt 
of gratitude long owed to three eminent teachers 
of the last age. The only way in which that 
acknowledgment could now be rendered, was by 
trying to hand on some knowledge of the men 
and of the work they did to a few at least of the 
younger generation. Each of these three papers 
has been introduced by a short biography, in the 
hope that the concrete facts might throw light on 
the abstract thoughts, and add to them a human 
interest. 

The thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge is 



Xiv PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

of such worth, that too much cannot be done to 
commend it to those unacquainted with it. They 
deserve to be known for this, if for nothing else, 
that they two were the men of most original 
genius who have been born into England for 
a century and more. But original genius has 
sometimes done questionable work, for which per- 
haps small thanks are due. Theirs, however, 
was not only original, it was beneficent genius. 
To a sense-bound age, rejoicing in a mechanical 
philosophy, they came speaking from the soul to 
the soul. In time they awakened a response. 
Younger men, one by one, turned towards them, 
and found in their teaching that which at once 
called out and satisfied their aspirations as no 
other writings of the time did. Whatever is best, 
deepest, most spiritual in the thinking and feeling 
of the last thirty years, is either their product or 
akin to it. But now again the recoil has come, 
and we are once more in the midst of a way of 
thinking which excludes the spiritual. As against 
this compacted system Wordsworth and Coleridge 
have certainly no complete system, no spiritual 
theory of life to furnish, but they supply a body 
of thought which, though unsystematized, is the 
best counteractive to be found in English litera- 
ture, till the full spiritual theory gets born. 

There is another aspect in which the mental 
experience of these men is instructive. This is 
proclaimed on all hands to be an age of disin- 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. XV 

tegration, when all old things must either be 
reconstructed or disappear. An uneasy, restless 
searching after something larger and more satis- 
fying, is no doubt visible on the surface both of 
books and of society. In this mood of men's 
minds, is there not something to be learnt from 
the experience of Wordsworth and Coleridge ? 
Here were two men of amplest power, born into 
an age fuller of anarchic change than our own. 
They threw themselves fearlessly on their time, 
broke with old faiths and institutions, in search 
of truth set their faces to the wilderness, and 
after sojourning for a season there, came out on 
the other side, and found peace. They have been 
branded for this as mere timid reactionaries. But 
this I believe to be no true account of them. If 
they returned in some sense to their first faiths, 
they did so not in blind conservatism, not as 
grasping at mere tradition in despair of truth, 
but as having, after long soul-travail, discovered 
a meaning in old truths they had not divined be- 
fore. After wandering many ways of thought, 
and having learnt in their wanderings to know 
themselves, they came back and found in Chris- 
tian truth that which alone met their need. 
They held it no longer by hearsay from with- 
out, but learned it anew from within, apprehend- 
ing it not in oldness of the letter, but in newness 
of the spirit. The spiritual principles, which as 
thinkers they held, found their complement in 



xvi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

evangelical religion, and gave to this last increased 
depth and expansion. This experience of theirs 
has not lost its import for our own day. 

Keble, the subject of the third essay, was not 
in mental endowments at all the equal of Words- 
worth and Coleridge. But he had gifts of his 
own as singular and as interesting as theirs. The 
devoutness and saintly purity, embalmed in his 
poetry, are as rare among men as their genius. 
Then he represents the most winning, to wit, the 
poetical and devotional, side of that great move- 
ment which has in so many ways changed the 
religious, the ecclesiastical, and the sesthetical 
aspects of English life. Many, no doubt, will 
think this small praise to him. But without 
entering on this subject, which has many sides, 
every religious heart must acknowledge not only 
the devout depth but the catholic sentiment of 
" The Christian Year." 

His strain, overheard among louder-voiced poets, 
is like that of his favorite red-breast among the 
other song-birds, and has added to English poe- 
try the note in which it was most wanting. 

The last essay is different from the other three. 
It does not centre round one man and his teach- 
ing, but deals with an abstract subject. But the 
thoughts it contains are, I believe, in harmony 
with the views set forth in the first three essays, 
— are indeed, as it were, but a prolongation of 
these views. In this country the ground prin- 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. xvii 

ciples of morality and religion haye generally been 
carefully kept apart. The moralist and the relig- 
ious teacher have each warned the other off Ins 
own ground, and resented any attempt to com- 
bine the two departments as an interference. 
Both have suffered from this unnatural estrange- 
ment. This foprth essay is an attempt to find 
the common ground on which these two subjects 
meet. It is certain that, when seen in their close 
and vital bearing on each other, moral thought 
will give substance and steadfastness to religion, 
and religion will give to morality a transcendent 
sanction and spiritual energy. 

This volume is published chiefly in the hope 
that it may reach some of the thoughtful young. 
Older persons do not much affect books of this 
kind. It is otherwise with those in whom thought 
is just awakening. If what I have written should 
lead any of these to acquaint themselves with the 
men here described, and to assimilate their thought, 
they will, I am sure, be the better for it, and the 
happier. 

St. Andrew's, March, 1868. 



CONTENTS. 



♦ 

PAGE 

Wordsworth 1 

Coleridge 90 

Keble 204 

The Moral Motive Power 269 



WORDSWORTH. 



The deep stirring of men's minds with which the 
last century closed, and the present century set in, 
expressed itself in many ways ; in no way more con- 
spicuously than in the prodigality of poetic genius which 
it poured forth. What gave the impulse to the broader, 
profounder, more living spirit, which then entered into 
all regions of thought, who shall determine? To re- 
count the literary commonplaces on the subject, to refer 
that great movement of mind to the French Revolu- 
tion, or to the causes of that Revolution, is easy ; but 
such vague talk does not really increase our knowl- 
edge. Perhaps it may be for the present enough to 
say, that the portentous political outbreak in France 
was itself but one manifestation of the new and changed 
spirit which, throughout Europe, then penetrated every 
department of human thought and action. Whatever 
the causes, the fact is plain, that with the opening of 
this century there was in all civilized lands a turning 
up of the subsoil of human nature, a laying bare of 
the intenser seats of action, thought, and emotion, such 
as the world had seldom, if ever before, known. That 
time was, what it has been called, " the new birth of 
imagination." 

The new spirit reached all forms of literature, and 
changed them. In this country it told more immedi- 
ately on poetry than on any other kind of literature, 
1 



2 WORDSWORTH: 

and recast it into manifold and more original forms. 
The breadth and volume of that poetic outburst can 
only be fully estimated by looking back to the narrow 
and artificial channels in which English poetry had run 
since the days of Milton. In the hands of Dryden 
and Pope, that which was a natural, free-wandering 
river, became a straight-cut, uniform canal. Or, with- 
out figure, poetry was withdrawn from country life, 
made to live exclusively in town, and affect the fashion. 
Forced to appear in courtly costume, it dealt with the 
artificial manners and outside aspects of men, and lost 
sight of the one human heart, which is the proper 
haunt and main region of song. Of nature it repro- 
duced only so much as may be seen in the dressed 
walks and gay parterres of a suburban villa on the 
Thames. As with the subjects, so with the style. Al- 
ways there was neatness of language, and correctness, 
according to a conventional standard ; often there was 
terseness, epigrammatic point, polished vigor ; but along 
with these there was monotony, constraint, tameness of 
melody. Those who followed, — Collins and Gray, 
Goldsmith and Thomson, — though with reviving nat- 
uralness, and more of melody, could not shake them- 
selves wholly free of the tyrant tradition, and throw 
themselves unreservedly on nature. Burns, if in one 
sense an anticipation of the nineteenth century poetry, 
is really, in reference to his contemporaries, to be re- 
garded as an accident : he grew so entirely outside, 
and independently, of the literary influences of his 
time. His poetry was a stream flowing apart, un- 
reached by the main current of literature. Yet, though 
little affected by contemporary poets, he was powerful 
with those who came after him. Wordsworth owns 
that it was from Burns he learnt the power of song 
founded on humble truth. It was Cowper, however, 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 3 

who first of English poets brought poetry back from 
the town to the country. His landscape, no doubt, 
was the tame one of the eastern counties, the fens of 
England ; there was in it nothing of the stern wild joy 
of the mountains. His sentiment moved among the 
household sympathies, not the stormy passions. But 
in Cowper's power of simple narrative and truthful de- 
scription, in his natural pathos and religious feeling, 
more truly than elsewhere, may be discerned the dawn 
of that new poetic era with which this century began. 

When we remember that during its first thirty years 
appeared all the great works of Wordsworth, Scott, 
Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, not to men- 
tion many a lesser name, we may be quite sure that 
posterity will look back to it as one of the most wonder- 
ful eras in English literature. What other age in this, 
I had almost said in any country has been, within the 
same space of time, so lavish of great poets ? In Eng- 
land, at any rate, if the Elizabethan and the succeed- 
ing age had each one greater poetic name, no age can 
show so goodly a poetic company. They who began 
life while many of those poets were still alive, and 
who can perhaps recall the looks of some of them, as 
they still sojourned with us, may not perhaps value 
to the full the boon which was bestowed on the gen- 
eration just gone. Only as age after age passes, and 
calls up no such second company, will men learn to 
look back to that poetic era with the admiration that 
is due. To sum up in one sentence the manifold im- 
port of all that those poets achieved, I cannot perhaps 
do better than borrow the discriminative words of Mr. 
Palgrave in his " Golden Treasury." They u carried 
to further perfection the later tendencies of the cen- 
tury preceding, in simplicity of narrative, reverence for 
human passion and character in every sphere, and im- 



4 WORDSWORTH- 

passioned love of nature : whilst maintaining on the 
whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, 
they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of 
tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers ; lastly, 
to what was thus inherited they added a richness in 
language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in 
narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight 
into the finer passages of the soul, and the inner mean- 
ings of the landscape, a larger and a wiser humanity, 
hitherto hardly attained and perhaps unattainable even 
by predecessors of not inferior individual genius." 

It is worth while to look somewhat more closely at 
the one of that poetic brotherhood who was the eldest 
born, the hardiest, the most original innovator of them 
all. For a survey of Wordsworth and his poetry there 
would seem to be now the more room, because his 
popularity, which during his lifetime underwent so re- 
markable vicissitudes, has, during the interval since his 
death, receded, and seems now to be at the ebb, with 
all save the few of genuine poetic instinct. 

It would form a strange chapter in literary history 
to trace the alternate rise and fall in poetic reputations. 
To go no further back than the contemporaries of 
Wordsworth, how various have been their fortunes ! 
Some, as Byron, were received, almost on their first 
appearance, with a burst of applause which posterity is 
not likely fully to reverberate. Some, as Scott — I 
speak only of his poetry, — were at first welcomed with 
nearly equal favor, afterwards for a time retired before 
a temporary caprice of public taste, but have since re- 
sumed what was their earliest, and is likely to be their 
permanent place. Others, as Campbell, had at once 
"the poetic niche assigned them, which they are likely 
hereafter to fill ; while others, as Shelley and Keats, 
received little praise of men, till they themselves were 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 5 

beyond reach of it. Wordsworth had a different for- 
tune from any of these. For more than twenty years 
after his earlier poems appeared, he experienced not 
simply neglect, but an amount of obloquy such as few 
poets have ever had to encounter. But sustained by 
his own profound conviction that his work was true and 
destined to endure, and by the sympathy of a very few 
discerning men, he calmly and cheerfully bode his hour. 
In time the clamor against him spent itself, the reaction 
set in between the years 1820 and 1830, reached its 
culmination about the time of his Oxford welcome in 
1839, and may be said to have lasted till his death in 
1850. Since then, in obedience to that law which gives 
living poets a stronger hold on the minds of their own 
generation than any poet, even the greatest, of a past 
age, Wordsworth may seem to have receded somewhat 
in the world's estimate. But his influence is, in its na- 
ture, too durable to be really affected by. these fashions 
of the hour. It is raised high above the shifting damps 
and fogs of this lower atmosphere, and shines from the 
poetic heaven with a benign and undying light. The 
younger part of the present generation, attracted by 
newer, but certainly not greater luminaries, may not 
yet have learned fully to recognize him. But there 
are many now in middle life, who look back to the time 
of their boyhood or early youth, when Wordsworth first 
found them, as a marked era in their existence. They 
can recall, it may be, the very place and the hour when, 
as they read this or that poem of his, a new light, as 
from heaven, dawned suddenly within them. The 
scales of custom dropped from their eyes, and they 
beheld all nature with a splendor upon it, as of the 
world's first morning. The common sights and sounds 
of -earth became other than they were. The heart 
leapt up to the white streaks of cloud, and looked on 



6 WORDSWORTH: 

the early stars of evening with a young wonder, never 
felt till then. Man too, and human life, cleared of the 
highway dust, came home to them more intimately, 
more engagingly, more solemnly, than before. For 
their hearts were touched by the poet's creative finger, 
and new springs of thought, tenderer wells of feeling, 
broke from beneath the surface. And though time and 
custom may have done much to dim the eye, and 
choke the feelings which Wordsworth once unsealed, 
no time can ever efface the remembrance of that first 
unvailing, nor destroy the grateful conviction that to 
him they owe a delicate and inward service, such as no 
other poet has equally rendered. 

Something of this service Wordsworth, I believe, is 
fitted to render to all men with moderately sensitive 
hearts, if they would but read attentively a few of his 
best poems. But to receive the full benefit, to draw 
out, not random impressions, but the stored wisdom of 
his capacious and meditative soul, he, above all modern 
poets, requires no cursory perusal, but a close and con- 
secutive study. It was once common to call him mys- 
tical and unintelligible. That language is seldom heard 
now. But many, especially young persons, or those 
trained in other schools of thought, or in no school at 
all, will still feel the need of a guide in the study of his 
poetry. For what is best in him lies not on the sur- 
face, but in the depth. It is so far hidden that it must 
needs be sought for. Not that his language is obscure : 
what he has to say is expressed for the most part in 
words as well ordered, as luminous, as adequate as any 
words in which thought so subtle and so deep has ever 
clothed itself. But many of his thoughts are of such a 
nature, so near, yet so hidden from men's ordinary ways 
of thinking, that the reader, ere he apprehend them, 
must needs himself go through somewhat of the same 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 7 

processes of feeling and reflection as the poet himself 
passed through in creating them. The need of this re- 
flective effort on the part of the reader is inherent in 
the nature of many of Wordsworth's subjects, and can- 
not be dispensed with. No doubt the effort is rendered 
much lighter to us than it was when his poems first ap- 
peared ; so much of what was then new in Wordsworth 
has since passed into the atmosphere of literature, and 
found its way to most educated minds. Still, with all 
this, there remains a large — perhaps the largest — 
portion of Wordsworth's peculiar wisdom unabsorbed, 
nor likely to be soon absorbed, by this excitement-crav- 
ing, unmeditative age. A thorough and appreciative 
commentary, which should open avenues to the study 
of Wordsworth, and render accessible his imaginative 
heights and his meditative depths, would be a boon to 
the younger part of this generation. The opening 
chapter of such a commentary would first set forth the 
facts and circumstances of the poet's life, would show 
what manner of man he was, how and by what influ- 
ences his mind was matured, from what points of view 
he was led to approach nature and human life, and to 
undertake the poetic treatment of these. A portion 
of such a chapter I propose to place now before my 
readers, — at least so far as to describe the facts of 
Wordsworth's early life, and the influences among 
which he lived, up to the time when he settled at Gras- 
mere, and addressed himself to poetry as the serious 
business of his life. 

Wordsworth was sprung from an old North-Hum- 
brian stock, as contrasted with the South-Humbrian 
race, a circumstance which has stamped itself visibly on 
his genius. The name of Wordsworth had been long 
known in the West Riding of Yorkshire, about the 
course of the Dove and the Don. Of old they had 



8 WORDSWORTH: 

been yeoman, or landed gentry, for both of these they 
call themselves in old charters, at Penistone, near 
Doncaster. In this neighborhood they can be traced 
back as far as the reign of Edward III. From York- 
shire the poet's grandfather is said to have migrated 
westward, and to have bought the small estate of Sock- 
bridge, near Penrith. His father, John Wordsworth, 
was an attorney, and having been appointed law-agent 
to the then Earl of Lonsdale, was set over the western 
portion of the wide domain of Lowther, and lived in 
Cockermouth, in a manor-house belonging to that noble 
family. John Wordsworth married Anne Cookson, 
daughter of a mercer in Penrith, whose mother, 
Dorothy, was one of the ancient northern family of 
Crackenthorpe, a name of note, both in logical and 
theological lore. These facts may be of little moment 
in themselves ; but they serve to show that in the wis- 
dom of Wordsworth, as in so many another poet, the 
virtues of an ancient and worthy race were condensed, 
and bloomed forth into genius. In that old mansion- 
house at Cockermouth, William was born on the 7 th of 
April, 1770, the second of four sons. There was only 
one daughter in the family, Dorothy, who came next 
after the poet. Cockermouth, their birthplace, though 
beyond the hill country, stands on the Derwent, called 
by the poet, " fairest of all rivers," and looks back to 
the Borrowdale mountains, among which that river is 
born. The voice of that stream, he tells us, flowed 
along his dreams while he was a child. When five 
years old, he used to spend the whole summer-day in 
bathing in a mill-race let off the river, now in the water, 
now out of it, now scouring the sandy fields, naked as a 
savage, while the hot, thundery noon was bronzing 
distant Skiddaw ; and then plunging in once more. 
His mother, a wise and pious woman, told a friend 



THE MAN AND THE POET, 9 

that William was the only one of her children about 
whom she felt anxious, and that he would be " remark- 
able either for good or evil." According to the Scot- 
tish proverb, he would either " mak a spoon or spoil 
a horn." This was probably from what he himself 
calls his " stiff, moody, and violent temper." Of this, 
which made him a wayward and headstrong boy, all that 
he seems afterwards to have retained was that reso- 
luteness of character which stood him in good stead 
when he became a man. 

Of his mother, who died when he was eight years 
old, the poet retained a faint but tender recollection. 
At the age of nine, William, along with his elder brother 
Richard, left home for school. It would be hard to 
conceive a school-life more fitted for a future poet than 
that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. 
This village lies in the vale, and not far from the lake, 
of Esthwaite, a district of gentler hill-beauty, but in full 
view, westward and northward, of Kirkstone Pass, Fair- 
field, and Helvellyn. Hawkshead school, as described 
in " The Prelude," must have been a strange contrast 
to the highly-elaborated school-systems of our own day. 
High pressure was then unknown ; nature and freedom 
had full swing. Bounds and locking-up hours they had 
none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village 
dames, in a natural, friendly way, like their own chil- 
dren. Their playgrounds were the fields, the lake, the 
woods, and the hill-sides, far as their feet could carry 
them. Their games were crag-climbing for ravens' 
nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, setting springes for 
woodcocks. For this latter purpose they would range 
the woods late on winter nights, unchallenged. Early 
on summer mornings, before a chimney was smoking, 
Wordsworth would make the circuit of the lake. 
There were boatings on more distant Windermere, and, 



10 WORDSWORTH: 

when their scanty pocket-money allowed, long rides to 
Furness Abbey and Morecambe Sands. 

In Wordsworth's fourteenth year, when he and his 
brother were at home for the Christmas holidays, their 
father, who had never recovered heart after the death 
of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home 
at Cockermouth was broken up, and the orphans were 
but poorly provided for. Their father had but little to 
leave his children. For large arrears were due to him 
by the strange, self-willed Earl of Lonsdale, whom De 
Quincey describes, and these his lordship never chose 
to make good. But the boys, not the less, returned to 
school, and William remained there till his eighteenth 
year, when he left for Cambridge. 

From Hawkshead, Wordsworth took several good 
things with him. In book-learning, there was Latin 
enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with 
pleasure in after years ; of mathematics, more than 
enough to start him on equality with the average of 
Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, I should suppose not 
much — at least we never hear of it afterwards. It 
was here that he began that intimacy with the English 
poets which he afterwards perfected ; while for amuse- 
ment he read the fictions of Fielding and Swift, of Cer- 
vantes and Le Sage. But neither at school nor in after 
life was he a devourer of books. 

Of actual verse-making, his earliest attempts date 
from Hawkshead. A long copy of verses, written on 
the second centenary of the foundation of the school, 
was much admired, but he himself afterwards pro- 
nounced them but a " tame imitation of Pope." Some 
lines composed on his leaving school, with a few of 
which the edition of his works of 1 857 opens, are more 
noticeable, as they, if not afterwards changed, contain a 
hint of his maturer self. But more important than any 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 11 

juvenile poems, or any skill of verse-making acquired 
at Hawkshead, were the materials for after thought 
there laid up, the colors laid deep into the groundwork 
of his being. In the " Evening Walk," composed 
partly at school, partly in college vacations, he notices 
how the boughs and leaves of the oak darken and come 
out when seen against the sunset. " I recollect dis- 
tinctly," he says nearly fifty years afterwards, "the 
very spot where this first struck me. It was on the 
way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me 
extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my 
poetical history ; for I date from it my consciousness 
of the infinite variety of natural appearances, which had 
been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so 
far as I was acquainted with them ; and I made a reso- 
lution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could 
not have been at that time above fourteen years of age." 
Not a bad resolution for fourteen ! And he kept it. It 
would be hardly too much to say that there is not a 
single image in his whole works which he had not 
observed with his own eyes. And perhaps no poet 
since Homer has introduced into poetry, directly from 
nature, more facts and images which had not before 
been noted in books. 

But more than any book-lore, more than any skill 
in verse-making, or definite thoughts about poetry, was 
the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was 
there that he was smitten to the core with that love 
of nature which became the prime necessity of his be- 
ing ; not that he was a moody or peculiar boy, nursing 
his own fancies apart from his companions. So far 
from that, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures, 
— the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harry- 
ing of ravens' nests. Weeks and months, he tells us, 
passed in a round of school tumult. No life could have 



12 WORDSWORTH: 

been every way more unconstrained and natural. But 
school tumult though there was, it was not in a made 
playground at cricket or rackets, but in haunts more 
fitted to form a poet — on the lakes and the hill-sides. 
Would that some poets, who have since been born, had 
had such a boyhood, had walked, like Wordsworth, 
unmolested in the cool fields, not been stimulated at 
school by the fever of emulation and too early intellect- 
uality, and then hurled prematurely against the life- 
wrecking problems of existence ! Whatever stimulants 
Wordsworth had came from within, awakened only by 
the common sights and sounds of nature. All through 
his school-time, he says that in pauses of the " giddy 
bliss" he felt — 

11 Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth 
And common face of nature spake to him 
Rememberable things." 

And as time went on, and common school pursuits lost 
their novelty, these visitations grew deeper and more 
frequent. At nightfall, when a storm was coming on. 
he would stand in shelter of a rock, and hear — 

" Notes that are 
The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
Or make their dim abode in distant winds." 

At such times he was aware of a coming down upon 
him of the " visionary power." On summer mornings 
he would rise, before another human being was astir, 
and alone, from some jutting knoll, watch the fir** 
gleam of dawn kindle on the lake : — 

" Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes 
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw 
Appeared like something in myself, a dream, 
A prospect of the mind." 

Is not this the germ of what afterwards became the 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 13 

" Ode on Intimations of Immortality ? " or rather, it is 
of hours like these that that Ode is the glorified re- 
membrance. 

In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, Words- 
worth passed from Hawkshead School to St. John's 
College, Cambridge. College life, so important to 
those whose minds are mainly shaped by books and 
academic influences, produced on him but little impres- 
sion. On men of strong inward bias the University 
often acts with a repulsive rather than a propelling 
force. Recoiling from the prescribed drill, they fall 
back all the more entirely on their native instincts. 
The stripling of the hills had not been trained for col- 
lege competitions ; he felt that he was not " for that 
hour, and for that place." The range of scholastic 
studies seemed to him narrow and timid. The college 
dons inspired him with no reverence, their inner heart 
seemed trivial ; they were poor representatives of the 
Bacons, Barrows, Newtons of the old time. As for 
college honors, he thought them dearly purchased at 
the price of the evil rivalries and narrow standard of 
excellence, which they fostered in the eager few who 
entered the lists. Altogether, he had led too free and 
independent a life to put on the fetters which college 
contests and academic etiquette exacted. No doubt he 
was a self-sufficient, presumptuous youth, so to judge 
of men and things in so famous a University. Such at 
least he must have appeared to college authorities ; 
very disappointing too he must have been to friends at 
home. They had sent him thither, with no little 
trouble, not to set himself up in opposition to authority, 
but to work hard, and by working to make his liveli- 
hood. And perhaps home friends and college tutors 
were not altogether wrong in their opinion of him, if 
we are to judge of men not wholly by after results. 



14 WORDSWORTH: 

Wordsworth at this time may probably enough have 
been a headstrong, disagreeably independent lad. Only 
there were latent in him other qualities of a rarer kind, 
which in time justified him in taking his own line. 

When he arrived in Cambridge, a northern villager, 
he tells us that there were other poor, simple school- 
boys from the north, now Cambridge men, ready to 
welcome him, and introduce him to the ways of the 
place. So, leaving to others the competitive race, he 
let himself, in the company of these, drop quietly down 
the stream of the usual undergraduate jollities : — 

" If a throng were near, 
That way I leaned by nature; for my heart 
Was social, and loved idleness and joy.' ' 

It sounds strange to read in the pompous blank verse 
of "The Prelude," how, while still a freshman, he 
turned dandy, wore hose of silk, and powdered hair. 
And again, how in a friend's room in Christ College, 
once occupied by Milton, he toasted the memory of 
the abstemious Puritan till the fumes of wine took his 
brain — the first and last time that the future water- 
drinker experienced that sensation. During the earlier 
part of his college course he did just as others did, 
lounged and sauntered, boated and rode, enjoyed wines 
and supper-parties, " days of mirth and nights of rev- 
elry ; " yet kept clear of vicious excess. 

When the first novelty of college life was over, he 
grew dissatisfied with idleness. Sometimes, too, he was 
haunted by prudent fears about his future maintenance. 
He withdrew somewhat from promiscuous society, and 
kept more by himself. Living in quiet, the less he felt 
of reverence for those elders whom he saw, the more 
his heart was stirred with high thoughts of those whom 
he could not see. As he lay in his bedroom in St. 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 15 

John's, he could look into the ante-chapel of Trinity, 
and watch the moonlight moving over the countenance 
of the great statue there — 

" Of Newton, with his prism and silent face, 
The marble index of a mind forever 
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone/' 

He read Chaucer under the hawthorn by Tromping- 
ton Mill, and made intimate acquaintance with Spenser. 
Milton he seemed to himself almost to see moving be- 
fore him, as, clad in scholar's gown, that young poet 
had once walked those same cloisters in the angelic 
beauty of his youth. 

So his time at Cambridge was not wholly lost. Two 
advantages at least he gained, noble thoughts about the 
great men who of old had tenanted that " garden of 
high intellects," and free intercourse with his fellow - 
men of the same age and of varied character — a special 
gain to one whose life, both before and afterwards, was 
passed so much in retirement. 

During the summer vacations he and his sister Doro- 
thy, who had been much separated since childhood, met 
once more under the roof of their mother's kindred in 
Penrith. With her he then had the first of those ram- 
bles — by the streams of Lowther and Emont — which 
were afterwards renewed with so happy results. Then, 
too, he first met Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, and his 
wife to be : — 

" By her exulting outside look of youth 
And placid tender countenance, first endeared." 

It was during his second or third year at Cambridge, 
when he had somewhat withdrawn from society, and 
lived more by himself, that he first seriously formed 
the purpose of being a poet, and dared to hope that he 
might leave behind him something that would live. 



16 WORDSWORTH: 

His last long vacation, to reading men often the sever- 
est labor of their lives, was devoted to a walking tour 
on the Continent along with a college friend from 
Wales. For himself he had long cast college studies 
and their rewards behind him, but friends at home, it 
may readily be imagined, could not see such foolhardi- 
ness without uneasy forebodings. What was to become 
of a penniless lad who thus played ducks and drakes 
with youth's golden opportunities ? But he had as yet 
no misgivings, he was athirst only for nature and free- 
dom. So with his friend Jones, staff in hand, he 
walked for fourteen weeks through France, Switzer- 
land, and the north of Italy. With four shillings each 
daily, they paid their way. They landed at Calais, on 
the eve of the day when the king was to swear to the 
new constitution. All through France, as they trudged 
along, they saw a people rising with jubilee to welcome 
in the dawn of, as they believed, a new era for man- 
kind. Nor were they onlookers only, but sympathizers 
in the intoxication of the time, joining in village revels 
and dances with the frantic multitude. But these 
sights did not detain them, for they were bent rather 
on seeing nature than man. Over the Alps, along the 
Italian lakes, they passed with a kind of awful joy. 
As they hurried down the southern slope of the Alps, 
Wordsworth tells us that the woods " decaying, never 
to be decayed," the drizzling crags, the cataracts, and 
the clouds, appeared to him no longer material things, 
but spiritual entities, " characters in a dread Apoca- 
lypse." 

In January, 1789, Wordsworth took a common de- 
gree and quitted Cambridge. The crisis of his life lay 
between this time and his settling down at Grasmere. 
He had resolved to be a poet, but even poets must be 
housed, clothed, and fed ; and poetry has seldom done 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 17 

this for any of its devotees, least of all such poetry as 
Wordsworth was minded to write. But it was not the 
question of bread alone, but a much wider, more com- 
plex one, which now pressed on him, — the same which 
so many a thoughtful youth, on leaving the University, 
with awakened powers, but no special turn for any of 
the professions, has had to face, — the question, What 
next ? In such cases the more gifted the querist, the 
harder becomes the problem. 

This mental trial, incident at all times to early man- 
hood, how must it have been aggravated to a youth 
such as Wordsworth, turned loose on a world just 
heaving with the first throes of the French Revolution ! 
He had seen it while it still wore its earliest auroral 
hues, when the people were mad with joy, as at the 
dawn of a regenerated earth. That he should have 
staked his whole hope on it, looked for all good things 
from it, who shall wonder? Coleridge, Southey, almost 
every high-minded young man of that time, hailed it 
with fervor. Wordsworth w T ould not have been the 
man he was, if he could have stood proof against the 
contagion. On leaving Cambridge he had gone to 
London. The spring and early summer months he 
spent there, not mingling in society, for probably he 
had few acquaintances, but wandering about the streets, 
noting all sights, observant of men's faces and ways, 
haunting the open book-stalls. During these months 
he tells us that he was preserved from the cynicism 
and contempt for human nature which the deformities 
of crowded life often breed, by the remembrance of 
the kind of men he had first lived amongst, in them- 
selves a manly, simple, uncontaminated race, and in- 
vested with added interest and dignity by living in the 
same hereditary fields in which their forefathers had 
lived time out of mind, and by moving about among 



18 WORDSWORTH: 

the grand accompaniments of mountain storms and 
sunshine. The good had come first, and the evil, 
when it did come, did not stamp itself into the ground- 
work of his imagination. The following summer he 
visited his travelling companion Jones in Wales, made 
a walking tour through that country, and beheld at 
midnight, on Snowdon, that marvelous moonlight vis- 
ion, which toward the end of " The Prelude " he em- 
ploys as an emblem of the transmuting power which 
resides in a high imagination, and which it exerts on 
the visible universe. 

When in London, he had heard Burke speaking 
from his place in the House of Commons on the great 
debates called forth by the Revolution, then in full 
swing : but he had listened unconvinced. In Novem- 
ber, 1791, he passed to Paris, and heard there the 
speeches that were made in the Hall of the National 
Assembty, while Madame Roland and the Brissotins 
were in the ascendent. A few days he wandered 
about Paris, surveyed the scenes rendered famous by 
recent events, and even picked up a stone as a relic 
from the site of the demolished Bastile. This rage 
for historic scenes he however confesses to have been 
in him more affected than genuine. From Paris he 
went to Orleans, and sojourned there for some time to 
learn the language. His chief acquaintance there was 
Beaupois, according to Wordsworth's description, a 
rarely gifted soul, pure and elevated in his aims. In 
youth he had been devoted to the service of ladies, 
with whom beauty of c<>uutenance, grace of figure, and 
refined bearing made him a great favorite. But now, 
though by birth one of the old French noblesse, he had 
severed himself from his order, and given himself with 
chivalrous devotion to the cause of the poor. One 
day, as Wordsworth and he were walking near Or- 



TEE MAN AND THE POET. 19 

leans, they passed a hungry-looking girl leading a half- 
starved heifer by a cord tied to its horn. The beast 
was picking a scanty meal from the lane, while the 
girl, with pallid hands and heartless look, was knitting 
for her bread. Pointing to her, Beaupois said with 
vehemence, "It is against that we are fighting." As 
they two wandered about the old forests around the 
city, they eagerly discussed, both the great events that 
were crowding on each other, and also those abstract 
questions about civil government, and man's natural 
rights, which the times naturally suggested. Words- 
worth owns that he threw himself headlong into those 
questions without the needful preparation, knowing 
little of the past history of France and of her institu- 
tions, and wholly uDversed in political philosophy. He 
only saw that the best ought to rule, and that they 
don't. In his boyhood, he says, he had lived among 
plain people, had never seen the face of a titled man, 
had therefore no respect for nor belief in such. He 
therefore now became a patriot and republican, deter- 
mined that kings and aristocracies should cease, and 
longed for a government of equal rights and individual 
worth, whatever that may mean. In the days that 
were coming, abject poverty was to disappear, equality 
w r as to bring in a golden time of happiness and virtue. 
After some months, spent together in sharing dreams 
like these, they parted, Wordsworth for Blois, and 
then for the fierce metropolis ; Beaupois to perish ere 
long — 

11 Fighting in supreme command 
Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire." 

When, in the autumn of 1792, Wordsworth came 
from Blois to Paris, the September massacre had taken 
place but a month before ; the king and his family 



20 WORDSWORTH: 

were in prison ; the Republic was proclaimed, and 
Robespierre in power. The young Englishman ranged 
through the city, passed by the prison where the king 
lay, visited the Tuileries, lately stormed, and the Place 
de Carrousel, a month since heaped with dead. As he 
lay in the garret of a hotel hard by, sleepless, and filled 
with thoughts of what had just taken place, he seemed 
to hear a voice that cried aloud to the whole city, 
" Sleep no more." Years after, those scenes still 
troubled him in dreams. He had ghastly visions of 
scaffolds hung with innocent victims, or of crowds ready 
for butchery, and mad with the levity of despair. In 
his sleep he seemed to be pleading in vain for the life 
of friends, or for his own, before a savage tribunal. 
A page of " The Prelude " is filled with the some- 
what vague reflections that came to him as he lay 
sleepless in his garret. The most definite of these is, 
that a nation's destiny often hangs on the action of 
single persons, and that the bonds of one common 
humanity transcend those of country and race. These 
vague truisms Lockhart, glad no doubt to make the 
young republican poet look ridiculous, condenses into 
this : " He revolved in his mind how the crisis might 
be averted, and, taking the measure of himself and of 
the various factions, he came to the conclusion that he, 
William Wordsworth, was the proper person to rally 
the nation and conduct the revolution to a happy 
issue." What authority for this interpretation Lock- 
hart had, except his wish to ridicule Wordsworth, it is 
not easy to guess. But just at this crisis, when the 
young poet, whatever line he had taken, was in immi- 
nent danger of falling along with his friends, the 
Brissotins, in the then impending massacres of May, 
he was forced — by what he then thought a harsh ne- 
cessity, but afterwards owned to be a gracious provi- 



TEE MAN AND THE POET, 21 

dence — to return to England. Lockhart suggests that 
his friends at home, becoming aware of the peril he 
was in, prudently recalled him by stopping the supplies. 

Returning to England at the close of 1792, he spent 
some time in London in great unsettlement and mental 
perplexity. He was horrified with the excesses in 
which the Revolution had landed, yet not the less he 
clung to his republican faith, and his hope of the 
revolutionary cause. When at length Britain inter- 
posed, his indignation knew no bounds ; this step, he 
said, was the first great shock his moral nature re- 
ceived. With an evil eye, he watched, off the Isle of 
Wight, the fleet that was to transport our armies to the 
Continent, — heard of the disasters of our arms with 
joy, and of our success with bitterness. When every 
month brought tidings of fresh enormities in France, 
.and opponents taunted him with these results of equal- 
ity and popular government, he retorted that these 
were but the overflow of a reservoir of guilt, which had 
had been filling up for centuries by the wrong doings 
of kings and nobles. Soon France entered on a war 
of conquest, and he was doomed to see his last hopes 
of liberty betrayed. Still striving to hide the wounds 
of mortified presumption, he clung, as he tells us, more 
firmly than ever to his old tenets, while the friends of 
old institutions goaded him still further by their tri- 
umphant scorn. Overwhelmed with shame and despond- 
ency at the shipwreck of his golden dreams, he turned 
to probe the foundations on which all society rests. 
Not only institutions, customs, law, but even the 
grounds of moral obligation and distinctions of right 
and wrong, disappeared. Demanding formal proof, 
and finding none, he abandoned moral questions in de* 
spair. This was the crisis of his malady. 

The nether gloom into which he was plunged, and 



22 WORDSWORTH: 

the steps by which he won his way back to upper air, 
are set forth in the concluding Books of " The Pre- 
lude,'' and are partly described in the character of the 
Solitary in " The Excursion." These self-descriptions, 
though somewhat vague, are yet well worth attention, 
for the light they throw on Wordsworth's own mental 
history, and as illustrating by what exceptional methods 
one of the greatest minds of that time was floated clear 
of the common wreck in which so many were en- 
tangled. His moral being had received such a shock 
that, both as regards man and nature, he tried to close 
his heart against the sources of his former strength. 
The whole past of history, he believed, was one great 
mistake, and the best hope for the human race was to 
cut itself off forever from all sympathy with it. Even 
the highest creations of the old poets lost their charm 
for him. They seemed to him mere products of pas- . 
sion and prejudice, wanting altogether in the nobility 
of reason. He tried by narrow syllogisms, he tells us, 
to unsoul those mvsteries of being which have been 
through all ages the bonds of man's brotherhood. This 
is rather vague ; but perhaps we are not wrong in sup- 
posing it to mean that he grew skeptical of those higher 
faiths which cannot be demonstrably proved. This 
moral state reacted on his feelings about the visible 
universe. It became to him less spiritual than it used 
to be. Turning on it the same microscopic, unimagina- 
tive eye which he had turned on the moral world, he 
learnt, by an evil infection of the time, alien to his 
own nature, to compare scene with scene, to search for 
mere novelties of form and color, dead to the moral 
power and the sentiment that resides in each individual 
place. He fell for a time under a painful tyranny of 
the eye, that craves ever new combinations of form, 
un counteracted by the reports of the other senses, unin- 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 23 

formed by that finer influence that streams from the 
soul into the eye. 

In this sickness of the soul, this " obscuration of the 
master vision," his sole sister Dorothy came, like his 
better angel, to his side. Convinced that his office on 
earth was to be a poet, not to break his heart against 
the hard problems of politics and philosophy, she led 
him away from perplexing theories and crowded cities 
into the open air of heaven. Together they visited, 
travelling on foot, many of the most interesting districts 
of their native England, and mingled freely with the 
country people and the poor. There, amid the fresh- 
ness of nature, his fevered spirit was cooled down, 
earth's " first diviner influence " returned, he saw already 
things again as he had seen them in boyhood. It was 
not merely that nature acted on his senses and so re- 
stored his mind's health. His understanding saw in the 
processes of earth and sky, going on by steadfast laws, 
a visible image of right reason. His' overwrought 
feelings were cooled and soothed by the contemplation 
of objects in which there is no fever of passion, no im- 
patience, no restless vanity. His imagination, dazzled 
ere while with the whirl of wild and transitory projects, 
found here something to rest on that was enduring. 
This free intercourse with nature in time brought him 
back to his true self, so that he began to look on life 
and the frame-work of society with other eyes, and to 
seek there too for that which is permanent and in- 
trinsicaUy good. At this time, as he and his sister 
wandered about various out-of-the-way parts of Eng- 
land where they were strangers, he found not delight 
only, but instruction, in conversing with all whom he 
met. The lonely roads were open schools to him. 
There, as he entered into conversation with the poor- 
est, often with the outcast and the forlorn, and heard 



24 WORDSWORTH: 

from them their own histories, he got a new insight 
into human souls, discerned in them a depth and a 
worth where none appear to careless eyes. The per- 
ception of these things made him loathe the thought 
of those ambitious projects which had lately deceived 
him. He ceased to admire strength detached from 
moral purpose, and learned to prize unnoticed worth, 
the meek virtues, and lowly charities. Settled judg- 
ments of right and wrong returned, but they were es- 
sential, not conventional judgments. In his estimate of 
men he set no store by rank or station, little by those 
" formalities " which have been misnamed education. 
For he seemed to himself to see utter hollowness in 
the talking, so-called intellectual world, and little good 
got by those who had held most intercourse with it. 
He now set himself to see whether a life of toil was 
necessarily one of ignorance ; whether goodness was a 
delicate plant requiring garden culture, and intellectual 
power a thing confined to those who call themselves 
educated men. And as he mingled freely with all 
kinds of people, he found a pith of sense and a solidity 
of judgment here and there among the unlearned 
which he had failed to find in the most lettered ; from 
obscure men he heard high truths, words that struck in 
with his own best thoughts of what was fair and good. 
And love, true love and pure, he found was no flower 
reared only in what is called refined society, and requir- 
ing leisure and polished manners for its growth. Ex- 
cessive labor and grinding poverty, he grants, by 
preoccupying the mind with sensual wants, often crush 
the finer affections. And it is difficult for these to 
thrive in the overcrowded alleys of cities, where the 
human heart is sick, and the eye looks only on de- 
formity. But in all circumstances, save the most ab- 
ject, sometimes even in these, he had seen the soul 



THE MAN AND THE POET, 25 

triumphing over sense, the heart beating all the truer 
from living in contact with natural wants, and with the 
reality of things. In our talk of these matters we mis- 
lead each other, and books mislead us still more, — 
books, which in that day more than now, being written 
mostly for the wealthy, put things in artificial light ; 
lower the many for the pleasure of the few, magnify 
external differences and artificial barriers that separate 
man from man, and neglect the one human heart. In 
opposition to all this, he himself had found " love in 
huts where poor men lie," the finest bloom of the 
affections where the outward man was rude to look 
upon ; under the humblest guise had seen souls that 
were sanctified by duty, patience, and sorrow: — 

M Of these, said I, shall be my song: of these, 
If future years mature me for the task, 
Will I record the praises, making verse 
Deal boldly with substantial tilings. My theme 
No other than the very heart of man, 
As found among the best of those who live — 
Not unexalted by religious faith, 

Not uninformed by books, good books, though few — 
In nature's presence: thence may I select 
Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight; 
And miserable love, that is not pain 
1 o think of. for the irlory that redounds 
Therefrom to human-kind, and what we are.*' 

Then follows a passage, perhaps the most finely 
thought, most perfectly expressed, in the whole u Pre- 
lude," in which he describes the different kinds of 
power, the different grades of nobleness, which he had 
found among the poor. It is too long to quote here, 
but those who care for these things will find it worth 
turning to. 

His mind being thus restored to tone, and able to 
look once more on common life with love and imagina- 
tive delight, the visible world reassumed the splendor 



26 WORDSWORTH. 

which it had worn for him in childhood, combined with 
that which only thought could add — a fuller conscious- 
ness of the sources whence this beauty comes. His 
eye now looked on nature with the wonder of the 
world's childhood, mellowed with the reflectiveness of 
its mature age. 

Such is the pathway by which Wordsworth describes 
himself as having travelled from darkness up to light, 
from distrust of all truth and despair, back to clear con- 
victions, and peace and hope. In reading it as set forth 
in " The Prelude " and " The Excursion," many have 
complained that his experience was an exceptional one, 
and contains no help for others. If so, small blame to 
him. Processes of this kind cannot be transferred bod- 
ily from one mind to another, like historical facts or 
mathematical proofs. It is not possible for minds of 
the order of Wordsworth's, which live by intuitions, 
rather than by chains of reasoning, to impart to others, 
or indeed to do more than hint at those intuitions, 
which, though the light of all their seeing, are born 
within them, they know not how. Even those who 
deal more with processes of reasoning, and who can 
trace exactly the lines of thought by which they seem 
to themselves to have been led upward, as Coleridge 
has in some measure done, although they may commu- 
nicate to others the intellectual shape which their own 
spiritual apprehensions have taken, cannot at the same 
time give that which is the life of these apprehensions. 
Those who read their arguments may, no doubt, grasp 
them and find help in them, in so far as their intellect- 
ual difficulties are the same as those of the writer. 
But will this enable them to envisage and make their 
own the primal truths on which the reasonings repose, 
and from which alone they draw their power ? Is it not 
of the nature of moral and spiritual truths, that if they 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 27 

once reach a man, they are their own sufficient evi- 
dence ? Once to feel them is to know them to be true, 
with a conviction such as no arguments can produce. 
But who shall enable another thus to feel truths which 
may be to himself the life of life ? Not the reasoner. 
He at best but convinces the understanding, does not 
satisfy the spirit. The inspired thinker, poet or other, 
can do more. He can touch others who are lower 
sunk than himself, by a kind of spiritual contagion. 
But even he cannot reach to the bottom, and minister 
healing to the mind diseased. In the last resort it will 
not be from the intellects and teachings of others that 
light will come. That, if it come at all, will come from 
a region beyond a man's consciousness, and by a pro- 
cess that he cannot analyze. In these deepest, most 
secret workings of the soul, no one man's experience 
will exactly fit in with that of any other man. 

But here I must pause. For in this account of 
Wordsworth's hour of darkness and restoration to light, 
given almost in his own words, I have somewhat out- 
run the order of dates and places. This restoration, 
though summed up in the concluding books of " The 
Prelude," could not have taken place in a few months, 
but must have been the work of at least several years. 
Though this inward fermentation working itself to 
clearness was the most important, the bread-question 
must, at the same time, have been tolerably urgent. 
To meet this, he had, as far as appears, simply nothing, 
except what was allowed him by his friends. Of 
course neither they nor he could long tolerate such a 
state of dependence. What, then, was to be done ? 
Three or four courses were open to him — the bar, 
taking orders, teaching private pupils, and writing for a 
London newspaper. All passed under his review, but 
to each and all he was nearly equally averse. It must 



28 WORDSWORTH: 

have been at this time that he felt so keenly those fore- 
bodings, afterwards beautifully described in his poem 
of " Resolution and Independence," when the fate of 
Chatterton and Burns rose mournfully before him, and 
he asked himself — 

" How can he expect that others should 
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call 
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? " 

In this juncture, the newspaper press, an effectual 
extinguisher to a possible poet, was ready to have ab- 
sorbed him. He had actually written to a friend in 
London, who was supporting himself in this way, to 
find him like employment, when he was delivered from 
these importunities by a happy occurrence. In the 
close of the } r ear 1794 and the beginning of 1795, he 
was engaged in attending at Penrith a friend, Raisley 
Calvert, who had fallen into a deep consumption. Cal- 
vert died early in 1795, and bequeathed to Wordsworth 
a legacy of £900. He had divined Wordsworth's 
genius, and believed that he would yet do great things. 
Seldom in deed has so small a sum produced larger 
results. It removed at once Words w r orth's anxiety 
about a profession, rescued him from the newspaper 
press, set him free to follow his true bent, and give free 
rein to the poetic power he felt working within him. 

One of the first results of the legacy was to restore 
Wordsworth permanently to the society of his sister. 
Hitherto, though they met whenever occasion offered, 
they had not been able to set up house together ; but 
now this was no longer impossible. And surely never 
sister performed a more delicate service for brother 
than Dorothy Wordsworth did for the poet. De 
Quincey has given a full and engaging portrait of that 
lady, as she appeared some years later than this, but 
still in her fervid prime, when he first made acquaint- 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 20 

ance with her brother's family at Grasmere. He de- 
scribes her as of "warm, even ardent manner," now 
bursting into strong expression, now checked by deco- 
rous self-restraint, of profound sensibility to all things 
beautiful, with quick sympathy and deep impressibility 
for all he , said or quoted, seemingly inwardly con- 
sumed by rt a subtle fire of impassioned intellect.' , And 
yet withal, so little of a literary lady, so entirely re- 
moved from being a blue-stocking, that she was ignorant 
of many books and subjects which, to most educated 
persons, were quite commonplace. Such she was 
when De Quincey hrst saw her more than ten years 
after the brother and sister besran to live together. 
We have seen how, when Wordsworth returned from 
France, depressed with shame, and despondency for his 
shipwrecked hopes, she turned him from dark and 
harassing thoughts, and brought him into contact with 
the healing powers of nature. In many places of his 
works the poet has borne grateful testimony to all she 
did for him. At this time, he tells us, it was she who 
maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true 
self, opened for him the obstructed passage between 
head and heart, whence in time came genuine self- 
knowledge and peace. Again, he says that his imagina- 
tion was by nature too masculine, austere, even harsh ; 
he loved only the sublime and terrible, was blind to the 
milder graces of landscape and of character. She it 
was who softened and humanized him, opened his eyes 
to the more hidden beauties, his heart to the gentler 
affections : — 

" She gave me eyes, she crave me ears : 
And humble cares, and delicate fears; 
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, 
And love, and thought, and joy." 

If there were no other records of her than those 



30 WORDSWORTH: 

brief extracts from her journal during the Highland 
tour, which stand at the head of several of her brother's 
poems, these alone would prove her possessed of a large 
portion of his genius. Longer extracts from them occur 
in the poet's biography and in the edition of the poems 
of 1857, and often they seem nearly as good as the 
poems which they introduce. Might not that wonder- 
ful journal, even yet, be given entire, or nearly so, to 
the world ? 

It was in the autumn of 1795, at Racedown in 
Dorsetshire, that the brother and sister, on the strength 
of the nine hundred pounds, set up house together. 
This was the first home they had of their own, and 
Wordsworth always looked back to it with a special 
love. So retired was the place, that the post came only 
once a week. But the two read Italian together, gar- 
dened, and walked on the meadows, and on the tops of 
the combs. These were their recreations. For serious 
work, Wordsworth fell first to writing Imitations of 
Juvenal, in which he assailed fiercely the vices of the 
time, but these he never published. Then he wrote in 
the Spenserian stanza the poem of " Guilt and Sorrow," 
not published till long afterwards, but in which there is 
more of his real self than in anything he had yet done. 
Then followed his tragedy, " The Borderers, ' which all, 
even his greatest admirers, feel to be a failure. Be- 
sides, there were one or two shorter poems, in his 
matured manner, such as the " Cumberland Beggar," 
which was written partly here, partly at Alfoxden. 
So many trials had Wordsworth to make, " The Even- 
ing Walk," the " Descriptive Sketches," " Imitations of 
Juvenal," " The Borderers," before he found out his 
true strength and his proper style. 

More important, however, than any poetry composed 
at Racedown was his first meeting there with S. T. 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 31 

Coleridge. Perhaps no two such men have met any- 
where on English ground during this century. Cole- 
ridge when at Cambridge had read the " Descriptive 
Sketches," and finding in them something he had never 
found in poetry before, longed to know their author. 
Since leaving Cambridge, though two years and a half 
younger than Wordsworth, he had gone through half a 
lifetime of adventure, had served as a private in a 
cavalry regiment, been an enthusiast for the French 
Revolution, had tried to emigrate with Southey, and to 
found a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, 
been stopped by want of funds, then turned Unitarian 
preacher, and was now a young poet and philosopher 
on the loose. Miss Wordsworth describes him as he 
looked on his first visit to Racedown. For the first 
three minutes he seemed plain : " Thin and pale, the 
lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, thick lips, 
not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, 
black hair," — a contrast to Wordsworth at this time, 
with his fine light- brown hair and beautiful teeth. But 
the moment Coleridge began to speak, you thought no 
faiore of these defects. You saw him as his friend after- 
wards described him — 

" The rapt one of the godlike forehead, 
The heaven- eyed creature." 

Or, as he elsewhere more fully portrayed him — 

M A noticeable man "with large grey eyes, 
And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly 
As if a blooming face it ought to be; 
Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear 
Depressed by weight of brooding phantasy; 
Profound his forehead was, though not severe." 

During this visit Wordsworth read aloud to Cole- 
ridge nearly twelve hundred lines of blank verse, — 
"superior/' says Coleridge, "to anything in our Ian- 



32 WORDSWORTH: 

guage." This probably included the story of Margaret, 
or "The Ruined Cottage," which now stands at the 
opening of *• The Excursion," and certainly, in blank 
verse, Wordsworth never surpassed that. When they 
parted Coleridge says, " I felt myself a small man beside 
Wordsworth ; " while of Coleridge, Wordsworth, cer- 
tainly no over-estimater of other men, said, ** I have 
known many men who have done wonderful things, but 
the only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge." 
Their first intercourse had ripened into friendship, and 
they longed to see more of each other. As Coleridge 
was at this time living at the village of Nether Stowey 
in Somersetshire, the Wordsworths removed in the 
autumn of 1797 to the country-house of Alfoxden, in 
the immediate neighborhood. The time he spent at 
Alfoxden was one of the most delightful seasons of 
Wordsworth's life. The two young men were of one 
mind in their poetic tastes and principles, one too in 
political and social views, and each admired the other 
more than he did any other living man. In outward 
circumstances, too, they were alike ; both poor in 
money, but rich in thought and imagination, both in the 
prime of youth, and boundless in hopeful energy. 
That summer as they wandered aloft on the airy ridge 
of Quantock, or dived down its silvan combs, what high 
talk they must have held ! Theirs was the age for 
boundless, endless, unwearied talk on all things human 
and divine. Hazlitt has said of Coleridge in his youth, 
that he seemed as if he would talk on forever, and you 
wished him to talk on forever. With him, as his youth, 
so was his age. But most men, as life wears on, having 
found that all their many and vehement talkings have 
served no lasting end of the soul, grow more brief and 
taciturn. Long after, Wordsworth speaks of this as a 
very pleasant and productive time. The poetic well- 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 33 

head, now fairly unsealed, was flowing freely. Many 
of the shorter poems were then composed from the 
scenery that was before his eyes, and from incidents 
there seen or heard. Among the most characteristic 
of these were, " We are Seven," " The Mad Mother," 
" The Last of the Flock," " Simon Lee," " Expostula- 
tion and Reply," " The Tables Turned," " Lines to his 
Sister," beginning "It is the first mild day of March," 
" Lines in early Spring," beginning " I heard a thou- 
sand blended notes," the last containing these words, 
which give the key-note to Wordsworth's feeling about 
nature at this time — 

" And 'tis my faith that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes." 

If any one will read over the short poems above 
named, they will let him see further into Wordsworth's 
mood during this, the fresh germinating spring-time of 
his genius, than any words about them can. 

The occasion of their making a joint literary ven- 
ture was curious. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sis- 
ter wished to make a short walking tour, for which 
five pounds were needed, but were not forthcoming. 
To supply this want they agreed to make a joint 
poem, and send it to some magazine which would give 
the required sum. Accordingly, one evening as they 
trudged along the Quantock Hills, they planned " The 
Ancient Mariner," founded on a dream which a friend 
of Coleridge had dreamed. Coleridge supplied most 
of the incidents, and almost all the lines. Words- 
worth contributed the incident of the shooting of the 
albatross, with a line here and there. "The Ancient 
Mariner " soon grew, till it was beyond the desired 
five pounds' worth, so they thought of a joint volume. 
Coleridge was to take supernatural subjects, or roman- 



34 WORDSWORTH: 

tic, and invest them with a human interest and resem- 
blance of truth. Wordsworth was to take common 
every-day incidents, and by faithful adherence to na- 
ture, and by true but modifying colors of imagination, 
was to shed over common aspects of earth and facts 
of life such a charm as light and shade, sunset and 
moonlight, shed over a familiar landscape. Words- 
worth was so much the more industrious of the two, 
that he had completed enough for a volume when 
Coleridge had only finished " The Ancient Mariner," 
and begun u Christabel " and " The Dark Ladie." Cot- 
tle, a Bristol bookseller, was summoned from Bristol to 
arrange for publication, and he has left a gossiping 
but amusing account of his intercourse with the two 
poets at this time, and his visit to Alfoxden. He 
agreed to give Wordsworth £30 for the twenty-two 
pieces of his which made up the first volume of the 
" Lyrical Ballads," while for 4fc The Rime of the Ancient 
Marin ere," which was to head the volume, he made a 
separate bargain with Coleridge. This volume, which 
appeared in the autumn of 1798, was the first which 
made Wordsworth known to the world as a poet, for 
the " Descriptive Sketches " had attracted little or no 
notice. Of the ballads or shorter poems, which, as we 
have seen, were mostly composed at Alfoxden, and 
which reflect the feelings and incidents of his life there, 
I shall reserve what I have to say for a more general 
survey. The volume closes with one poem in another 
style, in which the poet speaks out his inmost feel- 
ings, and in his own " grand style." This is the poem 
on Tintern Abbey, composed during a walking tour on 
the Wye with his sister, just before leaving Alfoxden 
for the Continent. Read these lines over once again, 
however well you may know them. Bear in mind 
what has been told of the way his childhood and boy- 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 35 

hood had passed, living in the eye of nature, the sepa- 
ration that followed from his favorite haunts and ways, 
the wild fermentation of thought, the moral tempest 
he had gone through, the return to nature's lonely 
places, and to common life and peaceful thoughts, with 
intellect and heart deepened, expanded, humanized, by 
having long brooded over the ever-recurring questions 
of man's nature and destiny ; bear these things in 
mind, and as you read, every line of that master- 
piece will come out with deeper meaning and in ex- 
acter outline. And then the concluding lines, in which • 
the poet turns to his sister, his fellow-traveller, with' 
" the shooting lights in those wild eyes," in whicn 
he caught ** gleams of past existence " — 

" If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
Should be thy portion " — 

what prophetic pathos do these words assume when we 
remember how long and mournfully ere life ended 
those wild eyes were darkened ! 

Before the volume appeared, "Wordsworth and his 
sister had left Alfoxden, and sailed with Coleridge for 
Germany. It has been said that the reason for their 
leaving Somersetshire was their falling under suspicion' 
as hatchers of sedition. A government spy, with a. 
peculiarly long nose, was sent down to watch them. 
Coleridge tells an absurd story, how, as they lay on' 
the Quantock Hills, conversing about Spinoza, the spy, ' 
as he skulked behind a bank, overheard their talk, and 
thought they were speaking about himself under the 
nickname of " Spy -nosey." Coleridge was believed to 
have little harm in him, for he was a crack-brained, 
talking fellow; but "that Wordsworth is either a 
smuggler or a traitor, and means mischief. He never 
speaks to any one, haunts lonely places, walks by 



36 WORDSWORTH: 

moonlight, and is always s booing about ' by himself." 
Such was the country talk ; and the result of it was, 
the agent for the owner of Alfoxden refused to re-let 
the house to so suspicious a character. So the three 
determined to pack up, and winter on the Continent. 
At Hamburg, however, they parted company. Their 
ostensible purpose was to learn German, but Words- 
worth and his sister did little at this. He spent the 
winter of 1798-99, the coldest of the century, in 
Goslar, and there, by the German charcoal-burners, the 
poet's mind reverted to Esthwaite and Westmoreland 
hills, and struck out a number of poems in his finest 
vein. " She dwelt among the untrodden ways," '*Lucy," 
or " Three years she grew in sun and shower," " Ruth," 
" The Poet's Epitaph," " Nutting," " The Two April 
Mornings," " The Fountain," " Matthew," are all 
products of this winter. So Wordsworth missed Ger- 
man, and gave the world instead immortal poems. 
Coleridge went alone to Gottingen, learned German, 
dived for the r$st of his life deep into transcendental 
metaphysics, and the world got no more Ancient 
Lfariners. 

In the spring of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister set 
forth from Goslar on their return to England. As 
they left that city behind, and felt the spring breeze 
fan their cheeks, Wordsworth poured forth that joyful 
strain with which u The Prelude " opens. Arrived in 
their native land, they passed most of the remainder of 
the year with their kindred, the Hutchinsons, at Sock- 
burn-on-Tees, occasionally travelling into the neighbor- 
ing dales and fells of Yorkshire. In September, 
Wordsworth took Coleridge, who also had returned 
from abroad, and had seen but few mountains in his 
life, on a walking tour to show him the hills and lakes 
of native Westmoreland. " Haweswater," Coleridge 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 37 

writes, " kept my eyes dim with tears, but I received 
the deepest delight from the divine sisters, Rydal and 
Grasmere." It was then that Wordsworth saw the 
small house at the Town End of Grasmere, which he 
and his sister soon after fixed on as their home. 

From Sockburn-on-Tees William and Dorothy 
Wordsworth set forth a little before the shortest day, 
and walked on foot over the bleak fells that form the 
watershed of Yorkshire and Westmoreland. As side 
by side they paced the long dales, and set their faces 
to the Hambleton hills, the ground was frozen hard 
under their feet, and the snow-showers were driving 
against them. Yet they enjoyed the snow-showers, 
turned aside to see the frozen waterfalls, and stopped 
to watch the changing drapery of cloud, sunshine, and 
snow-drift as it coursed the hills. At night they 
lodged in cottages or small wayside inns, and there, by 
the kitchen fire, Wordsworth gave words to the 
thoughts that had occurred to him during the day. 
A great part of " Hart-leap Well " was composed 
during one of these evenings, from a tradition he had 
heard that day from a native. And of a sunset seen 
during the same journey, some of the glory still lives 
in the sonnet ending 

u They are of the sky, 
And from our earthly memory fade away." 

The poet and his sister reached Grasmere on the 
shortest day of the year 1799, and settled in the small 
two-storied cottage at that part of the village called 
Town-End. The house had formerly been a public 
house, with the sign of the Dove and the Olive Bough, 
but was henceforth to be identified with Words \orth's 
poetic prime. The mode of life on which they were 
entering was one which their friends, no doubt, and 



38 WORDSWORTH: 

most sensible people, called a mad project. With 
barely a hundred pounds a year between them, they 
were turning their back on the world, cutting them- 
selves off from professions, chances of getting on, so- 
ciety, and settling themselves down in an out-of-the- 
way corner, with no employment but verse-making, 
no neighbors but the homely dalesmen. When a man 
makes such a choice, he has need to look well what he 
does, and to be sure that he can go through with it. 
In the world's eyes nothing but success will justify 
such a renunciant, and the world will not be too ready 
to grant that success has been attained. But Words- 
worth, besides a prophet- like devotion to the truths he 
saw, had a prudence, self-denial, and perseverance, rare 
among the sons of song. To himself may be applied 
the words he uses in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, 
when speaking of another subject than poetry : " It 
is such an animating sight to see a man of genius, re- 
gardless of temporary gains, whether of money or 
praise, fixing his attention solely upon what is interest- 
ing and permanent, and finding his happiness in an 
entire devotion of himself to such pursuits as shall 
most ennoble human nature. We have not yet seen 
enough of this in modern times." He himself showed 
this sight, if any man of his age did. Plain living and 
high thinking were not only praised in verse, but acted 
out by him and his sister in that cottage home. 

The year 1800 was ushered in by a long storm, 
which blocked up the roads for months, and kept them 
much indoors. This put their tempers to the proof, 
but they stood the test. Spring weather set them free, 
and brought to their home a much loved sailor brother, 
John, who was captain of an Indiaman. In their 
frugal housekeeping the sister, it may be believed, had 
much to do indoors, but she was always ready, both 



TEE MAN AND THE POET. 39 

then and years after, to accompany her brother in his 
mountain walks. Those who may wish to know more 
of their abode and way of life, will find an interesting 
sketch of these given by De Quincey, as he saw them 
seven years later. There was one small room con- 
taining their few books, which was called, by courtesy, 
the library. But Wordsworth was no reader ; the 
English poets and ancient history were the only two 
subjects he was really well read in. He tells a friend 
that he had not spent five shillings on new books in 
as many years, and of the few old ones which made 
up his collection he had not read one fifth. As for 
his study, that was in the open air. " By the side of 
the brook that runs through Easdale," he says, " I 
have composed thousands of verses :" — 

" He murmurs near the running: brooks 
A music sweeter than their own." 

Another favorite resort for composition at this time 
was the tall fir-wood on the hillside above the old road 
leading from Grasmere to Rydal. Society they found 
in the families of the " statesmen " all about. For 
Grasmere was then, like most of the neighboring dales, 
portioned out among small but independent peasant 
lairds, whose forefathers had for ages lived and died on 
the same farms. With these men Wordsworth and his 
sister lived on terms of kindliness and equal hospitality. 
He would receive them to tea in his home, or would 
go to sup in theirs. If the invitation was to some 
homestead in a distant vale, the ladies would travel in 
a cart, the poet walking by its side. Among these 
men, in their pastoral republic, the life was one of not 
too laborious industry ; the manners were simple, 
manly, and severe. The statesmen looked after the 
sheep, grew hay on their own land in the valley, and 



40 WORDSWORTH: 

each could turn out as many sheep to feed on the fell 
or common (as they call it) during the summer months, 
as they could provide hay for in the winter. Their 
chief source of income was the wool from the flock, 
and this not sold in the fleece, but spun into thread by 
the wives and daughters. These, with their spinning- 
wheels, were in high esteem, for they did more to 
maintain the house than the spade or plough of the 
husbands. Wordsworth loved this manner of life, not 
only because he had been familiar with it from child- 
hood, but also because he knew what sterling worth 
and pure domestic virtues sheltered under these roofs. 
He lived to see it rudely broken up. Machinery put 
out the spinning-wheel, and the statesmen's lands 
passed for the most part into other hands. 

The few statesmen's families who survived down to 
a recent time in and around Grasmere, retained an 
affectionate and reverent remembrance of the " pawet," 
as they in their Westmoreland dialect called him, long 
after he had left them for Rydal Mount. Many stories 
I have heard them tell of his ways, while living at the 
Town-End ; how, alone, or oftener with his sister, at 
night-fall, when other people were going to bed, he 
would be seen setting out to walk to Dunmail Raise, 
or climbing that outlying ridge of Fairfield which over- 
hangs the forest side of Grasmere, there to be all night 
long till near the breaking of the day. At such a time 
it may well have been, when on those heights he was 
alone with the stars, and the voices of the mountain 
streams were coming up from far below, that the •* Ode 
on Mortality " first came to him. When in their 
houses strangers have read aloud, or told in their own 
words some of his shorter poems descriptive of incident 
and character, or the two books of " The Excursion " 
which describe the tenants of the churchyard among 



TEE MAN AND TEE POET. 41 

the mountains, I have heard old residenters name many 
of the persons there alluded to, and go on to give more 
details of their lives. 

The first months at Grasmere were so industriously 
employed, that some time in the year 1800, when a 
second edition of the first volume of u Lyrical Ballads " 
was being reprinted, he added to it a new volume con- 
taining thirty-seven new pieces. Among these were 
the poems already mentioned as having been composed 
during the German winter, as well as some new ones 
which had been suggested since he settled at Grasmere. 
Such were the " Idle Shepherd Boys," " Poems on the 
Naming of Places," " The Brothers," u Michael," all 
redolent of the Westmoreland fells. These two vol- 
umes cannot be said to have failed, for they were re- 
printed in 1802, and again in 1805; and in 1806, 
Jeffrey, even when inveighing against a new and better 
volume of poems, speaks of the " Lyrical Ballads " as 
" unquestionably popular." I shall not, however, stay to 
comment on their contents till I have done with narra- 
tive. Only a few facts stand out prominently from the 
happy and industrious tenor of the life at Grasmere. 
In 1802, that Earl of Lonsdale, who to the last refused 
to pay to the Words worths their due, died, and was 
succeeded by a better-minded kinsman, who paid to 
them the original debt of £5,000 due to their father, 
with £3,500 of interest. This was divided into five 
shares, of which two went to the poet and his sister. 
This addition to his income enabled the poet to take 
to himself a wife, his cousin, and the intimate friend 
of his sister, Mary Hutchinson, whom he had long 
known and loved. It is she whom he describes in his 
exquisite lines — 

" A creature not too bright or good 
For human nature's daily food; 



42 WORDSWORTH: 

A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, and command; 
And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light." 

They lived together in as great happiness as is allowed 
to human beings, till the poet had fulfilled his fourscore 
years, when she survived him a few years longer. 

In the August of 1803, Mrs. Wordsworth having 
been kept at home by domestic duties, Wordsworth 
and his sister set out from Keswick with Coleridge on 
their memorable tour in Scotland. They travelled 
great pan of the way on foot, up Nithsdale, and so on 
towards the Highlands. Coleridge turned back soon 
after they had reached Loch Lomond, being either lazy 
or out of spirits. Everywhere as they trudged along, 
they saw the old familiar Highland sights, as if none 
had ever seen them before ; and wherever they moved 
among the mountains, they left footprints of immortal ' 
beauty. He expressed what he saw in verse, she in 
prose, and it is hard to say which is the more poetic. 
Of all that has been, or yet may be, said or sung about 
the Highlands, what words can 'ever equal those entries 
in her journal ? what poems can ever catch the soul 
of things like the " Address to Kilchurn Castle," 
* Glen-Almain," " Stepping Westward," and " The 
Solitary Reaper ? " The last of these, perhaps the 
most perfect of Wordsworth's poems, must have been 
suggested as they walked somewhere in the region 
about Loch Voil, between the braes of Balquhidder 
and- Strathire. What was the name of her who sug- 
gested it, and where is she now? Who can tell ? But 
whether she be still alive in extremest old age, or, as 
is far more likely, long since laid in Balquhidder kirk- 
yard or in some other, in that poem she will sing on for- 
ever in eternal youth, to delight generations yet to be. 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 43 

In the beginning of 1805, the first great sorrow fell 
on Wordsworth's home, in the loss of his brother, Cap- 
tain Wordsworth. He was leaving England, intend- 
ing to make one more voyage, and then to return and 
live with his sister and brother, when, by the careless- 
ness of a pilot, his ship was run on the shambles of the 
Bill of Portland, and he with the larger part of his 
crew went down. For long Wordsworth was almost 
inconsolable, he so loved and honored his brother. His 
letters at this time, and his poems long after, are 
darkened with this grief. In one of these letters this 
striking thought occurs: " Why have we sympathies 
that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and 
sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the 
Supreme Governor ? Why should our notions of right 
towards each other, and to all sentient beings within 
our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be 
his notion and rule, if everything were to end here ? " 
Captain Wordsworth had greatly admired his brother's 
poetry, but saw that ir would take time to become pop- 
ular, and would probably never be lucrative. So he 
would work for the family at Town-End. he said, and 
William would do something for the world. " This is 
the end of his part of the agreement," says the poet ; 
" God grant me life and strength to fulfill mine ! " 

In 1807, Wordsworth came out with two more vol- 
umes of poetry, for the most part produced at Gras- 
mere. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, so that 
these volumes may be said to close the spring-time of 
his genius, and to be its consummate flower. Some of 
his after works may have equaled these, and may even 
show an increased moral depth and religious tender- 
ness. But there is about the best of the Grasmere 
poems an ethereal touch of ideality which he perhaps 
never afterwards reached. Besides the Scottish poems 



44 WORDSWORTH: 

already noticed, there were the earliest installment of 
sonnets, some of them the best he ever wrote, as that 
" London seen from Westminster Bridge ; " " It is a 
beauteous evening, calm and free ;" " The World is too 
much with us ; " " Toussaint L'Ouverture ; " " Milton, 
thou shouldst be living at this hour ! " 

These volumes contain also u The Song of Brougham 
Castle ; " " Resolution and Independence ; " the poem 
to the Cuckoo, beginning, " blithe new-comer ; " 
" Elegiac Stanzas suggested by the picture of Peele 
Castle ; " and last, and chief of all, the " Ode on Inti- 
mations of Immortality." The three last named espe- 
cially have that indescribable, unapproachable ideality, 
which I have spoken of as the characteristic of his 
best poems at this time. Indeed, the " Ode on Immor- 
tality " marks the highest limit which the tide of po- 
etic inspiration has reached in England within this cen- 
tury, or indeed since the days of Milton. 1 

As Wordsworth's outward as well as his inward his- 
tory has been traced thus far, it may be well not to 
take leave of it without here noting the few facts that 
yet remain. The cottage at the Town-End of Gras- 
mere was his home from the close of 1799 till the 
spring of 1808. This was the time when his inspira- 
tion was at flood-tide. At Town-End, as we have 
seen, " Michael," " Resolution and Independence," " The 
Cuckoo," " The Solitary Reaper," and the other memo- 
rials of Scotland, " The Song of Brougham Castle," 
" Stanzas on Peele Castle," and, above all, the immor- 
tal " Ode," first saw the light. There too most of 

1 It has lately been suggested that Wordsworth owed the first hint of 
this great ode to Henry Vau<zhan's poem called the R treat. But those 
who have observed how deep down in Wordsworth's nature lay that sense 
of the mystery and ideality of childhood, and how often it crops out in 
his works, will be slow to believe that he had to go to any extrinsic source 
to find it. 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 45 

* The Prelude " was written, besides many smaller 
poems. In 1808, as the Town-End cottage had grown 
too small for his increasing family, he was obliged to 
move to Allan Bank, — a new house which was hardly 
finished, on the top of a knoll to the west of Grasmere, 
overlooking the lake. Here he remained till the spring 
of 1811 ; but the house was for some time unfinished, 
and the chimneys smoked, and to this his biographer 
has attributed, what he thinks, a comparative dearth of 
production during these three years. But it should be 
remembered that it was probably at Allan Bank that 
the greater part of " The Excursion " was composed, 
though it was not published till some years later. 
Coleridge was an inmate of Wordsworth's home during 
the earlier part of the Allan Bank residence. In the 
spring of 1811, Wordsworth was obliged to remove 
thence to the Parsonage of Grasmere, situated between 
the church and the lake. The poet's stay here was 
darkened by the loss of two of his little children, a girl 
and a boy, who were laid side by side in the same 
grave, hard by in Grasmere churchyard. A small blue 
stone preserves the following epitaph written by the 
poet over his boy : — 

" Six months to six years added he remained 
Upon this sinful earth, by sin unstained : 
blessed Lord ! whose mercy then removed 
A Child whom every eye that looked on loved ; 
Support us, teach us calmly to resign 
"What we possessed, and now is wholly thine! M 

This affliction, which at the Parsonage was rendered 
insupportable by the continual sight of the two graves, 
made the poet and his family glad to quit the vale of 
Grasmere for a new home at Rydal Mount, which 
offered itself in the spring of 1813. This was their 
last migration, and there the poet and his wife lived 



46 WORDS WORTH i 

till, many years after, they were carried back to join 
their children in the churchyard of Grasmere. 

Rydal Mount saw a good deal of poetry composed, 
but not much in the poet's finest vein. It witnessed, 
however, many other good things : an easy competence 
brought to the poet's door in the shape of a distributor- 
ship of stamps, — the steady growth of his reputation 
from comparative obscurity till he took his acknowl- 
edged place beside the chief kings of English song, — ■ 
thirty-seven years of contented and beneficent life, 
rounded by a peaceful close. Besides the two children 
lost in 1812, the poet's family consisted of a daughter 
and two sons. The daughter, k4 Dora," afterwards Mrs. 
Quillinan, died before her father ; the two sons still 
survive. These facts are not irrelevant, but essential 
ones to the understanding of Wordsworth. Few poets 
have been by nature so fitted for domestic happiness, 
and fewer still have been blessed with so abundant a 
share of it. The strength and purity of his home 
affections, so deep and undisturbed, entered into all that 
he thought and sang. Herein may be said to have 
lain the heart of " central peace " that sustained the 
whole fabric of his life and poetry. 

The account I have given of the growth of Words- 
worth's mind from childhood to maturity has been ex- 
tracted mainly from " The Prelude," and is meant to 
throw light on the aim and spirit of his poetry. If a 
discriminating mental history of the poet could be given, 
followed by an edition of his works, in which the sev- 
eral poems were arranged, not in the present arbitrary 
manner, but chronologically according to the date of 
their composition, this would form the best of all com- 
mentaries. There were three epochs in Wordsworth's 
poetry, though these shade so insensibly the one into 
the other, that any attempt exactly to define them 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 47 

must be somewhat arbitrary. What I have already 
called the spring-time of his genius would reach from 
his first settling at Racedown, or at any rate his going 
to Alfoxden in 1797, till his leaving Grasmere Town- 
End in 1808. The second epoch, or full midsummer 
of his poetry, would include his time at Allan Bank 
and his first years at Rydal Mount, as far as 1818 or 
1820. This was the time when "The Excursion," 
'• Laodamia," " Dion," and the " Duddon Sonnets " were 
composed. The third epoch, or the sober autumn, 
reaching from about 1820 till he ceased from the work 
of composition, is the time of the ecclesiastical and other 
sonnets, of " Yarrow Revisited," and the Scottish poems 
of 1833 ; and lastly, of the memorials of his Italian 
tour in 1837. 

But to return to the poems of the first epoch. It 
was the two volumes of 1807, those which, as we have 
seen, contained the very prime ore of his genius, that 
called forth Jeffrey's well-known vituperation. The 
unfairness of that review lay in this, that the weak 
parts of the book were brought out in strong relief, 
while the best were thrown as far as possible into the 
background. Over " the unfortunate Alice Fell," as it 
has been called, the critic makes himself merry, and by 
extracting a number of homely matter-of fact lines and 
stanzas, which occur here and there in the other poems, 
contrived to make Wordsworth's name a by-word for 
many a day for bathos and puerility. But his verdict 
on the very best — those which all the world has since 
acknowledged — prove that to the Edinburgh lawgiver 
on matters of taste, poetic originality was as a picture 
to a blind man's eye. " Yarrow Un visited " he calls 
" a very tedious, affected performance." After quoting 
from and describing " Resolution and Independence," 
he thus concludes : u We defy the bitterest enemy of 



48 WORDSWORTH: 

Mr. "Wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel to 
this from any collection of English poetry, or even from 
the specimens of his friend Mr. Southey." In the same 
strain he quotes from the " Ode to the Cuckoo/' in 
which he thinks that the author, striving after force and 
originality, produces nothing but absurdity. Lastly, 
the " Ode on Immortality " is " the most illegible and 
unintelligible part of the publication." The only parts 
of the two volumes quoted with approbation are the 
Brougham son^ and three sonnets. These facts I lnive 
mentioned, not from a wish to disinter long since buried 
strifes, but because allusion to them is necessary to 
briii£ out the true force of Wordsworth both as a man 
and a poet. The result of this review was to stop the 
sale of his poems for a number of }^ears. But whoever 
else might be snuffed out by a severe review, Words- 
worth could not be so silenced. To a friend who wrote 
condoling with him on the severity of the criticism — 
and it must be remembered that in those days the ver- 
dict of the " Edinburgh " was all but omnipotent — he 
replied : " Trouble not yourself upon their present re- 
ception ; of what moment is that compared with what I 
trust is their destiny ! — to console the afflicted ; to add 
sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier ; to 
teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to 
think, and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively 
and securely virtuous ; this is their office, which 1 trust 
they will faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all 
that is mortal of us) are mouldering in our graves." 
Again : " I doubt not that you will share with me ah 
invincible confidence that my writings (and among them 
these little poems) will cooperate with the benign 
tendencies in human nature aud society, wherever 
found ; and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious 
in making men wiser, better, and happier." This Ian- 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 49 

guage is not vanity, but the calm confidence of a man 
who feels the rock under his feet, knows that he is in 
harmony with the everlasting truth of things. In the 
issue between the critic and the poet, the world, long 
neutral, or rather adverse to the latter, at length sided 
with him, and will continue permanently to do so. 
Before his death he saw posthumous fame secured to 
him ; but it is instructive to note what a change thirty 
years had made in his feeling regarding it. In 1837, 
he thus writes to another correspondent : " I am stand- 
ing on the brink of that vast ocean I must sail so soon : 
I must speedily lose sight of the shore ; and I could 
not once have conceived how little I now am troubled 
by the thought of how long or how short a time they 
who remain on that shore may have sight of me." 

What is there in these poems which there is not in 
any other ? What is their peculiar virtue ? To seize 
and set forth in words the heart of anything with 
which we have been long familiar is not easy ; never- 
theless something of this kind must, however imper- 
fectly, be attempted. In the opening of " The Pre- 
lude," Wordsworth tells us that when he first seriously 
thought of being a poet, he looked into himself to see 
how he was fitted for the work, and seemed to find 
there " that first great gift, the vital soul." In this 
self-estimate he did not err. The vital soul, it is a 
great gift, which, if ever it dwelt in man, dwelt in 
Wordsworth. Not the intellect merely, nor the heart, 
ndr the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any of 
these alone, but all of them condensed into one, and 
moving all together. In virtue of this vital soul, 
whatever he did see he saw to the very core. He did 
not fumble with the outside or the accidents of the 
thing, but his eye went at once to the quick, — rested 
4 



50 WORDSWORTH: 

on the essential life of it. He saw what was there, but 
had escaped all other eyes. He did not import into the 
outward world transient fancies or feelings of his own, 
" the pathetic fallacy," as it has been named ; but he 
saw it, as it exists in itself, or perhaps rather as it exists 
in its permanent moral relations to the human spirit. 

Again, this soul within him did not work with effort ; 
no painful groping or grasping. It was as vital in its 
respectivity as in its active energy. It could lie long 
in a " wise passiveness," drawing the things of earth 
and sky and of human life into itself, as the calm, clear 
lake does the imagery of the surrounding hills and 
overhanging sky. 

" Think not, 'mid all this mighty sum 
Of things forever speaking, 
That nothing in itself will come, 
But we must still be seeking." 

Those early spring poems at Alfoxden, from which 
these lines are taken, specially express what I mean, 
— the wonderful interchange that went on between 
him and all the things about him, they flowing into 
him, he flowing out into them. His soul attracted 
them to itself, as a mountain-top draws the clouds, and 
at their touch woke up to feel its kinship with the 
mysterious life that is in all nature, and in each sepa- 
rate object of nature. This is the cardinal work of the 
imagination, to possess itself of the life of whatever 
thing it deals with. In the extent to which he did 
this, and the truthfulness with which he did it, lies 
Wordsworth's supreme power. 

Hence one may observe that all genuine imagina- 
tion is essentially truthful, and the purer it is, the 
more truthful. The reports it brings in, so far from 
being mere fancies, are the finest, most hidden truths. 
In Wordsworth, the higher his inspiration rises, the 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 51 

more penetrating is his truthfulness. What may be 
the relation between the truths which imagination re- 
veals, and those which are the result of scientific dis- 
covery, who shall determine ? — it would be a fine 
inquiry for one who can to work at ; but every one 
must feel that — 

" The moon doth with delight 
Look round her when the heavens are bare," 

gives the essence of a clear moonlight sky more truth- 
fully in its relation to the human spirit, than any mere 
meteorologist can do. What words, poetic or scientific, 
will ever render the mountain stillness like these few 
plain ones ? — 

" The sleep that is among the lonely hills ; " 

or the impression made by a solitary western peak, 
like — 

" There is an eminence of these our hills, 
The last that parleys with the setting sun." 

It is this rendering of the inner truth of things which 
Mr. Arnold has happily called " the interpretative 
power of poetry." This must be that which Words- 
worth himself means when, in his preface, he says that 
" poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ; 
it is the impassioned expression which is in the coun- 
tenance of all science." And it is " the vital soul " 
in the poet which penetrates into this, and reads it off 
for other men. This, too, is what is meant when we 
find it said in " The Prelude " that imagination, in its 
highest use, is but another name for " absolute power, 
clearest insight, reason in her most exalted mood ; " 
and that this imagination, exercised on outward nature 
and on human life, is the parent of love, or feeling 
intellect. This language will, no doubt, to some sound 



T)2 WORDSWORTH: 

mystical. But it is the language of one who possessed 
that which he spoke of in larger mass, and of finer 
quality, than any Englishman since Shakespeare and 
Milton. It is the presence of this power in Words- 
worth which is the source of that indescribable charm 
which many have felt in his poetry, and have found in 
none other before or since. They were brought by it 
for a moment soul to soul with truth, caught, as they 
read, a glimpse into the life of things such as no other 
poet of these days has given them. This clearness of 
vision, rare at all times, becomes much rarer as the 
ages go on. The naming era, when men could still 
give names to things, is long past, and with disuse the 
faculty has died out. Under heaps of words, which we 
receive without effort, dead metaphors, fossils of extinct 
poetic acts, the moulding power of imagination lies 
buried. And not only language has got stiff and hard- 
ened, but society has become complicated in a thousand 
ways ; phrases, custom, conventionality, doubts, dis- 
putes, lie many layers thick above every new-born 
soul. The revolutionary age into which Wordsworth 
was born may have made some rents in these, and let 
the basement of truth be here and there seen through. 
And yet, even with this help, what power must have 
dwelt in that quiet eye to put all these obstructions 
aside, and see things anew for itself, as if no one had 
ever looked on them before ! 

This power manifests itself in Wordsworth especially 
in two directions, as it is turned on nature, and as it is 
turned on man. Let us, for the sake of clearness, ex- 
amine them separately, though, in reality, they often 
blend. Between Wordsworth's imagination, however, 
as it works in the one direction and in the other, there 
is this difference. In dealing with nature, it has no 
limit : it is as wide as the world ; as much at home 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 53 

when gazing on the little celandine, as when moving 
with the vast elemental forces of earth and heaven. 
In human life and character his range is narrower, 
whether these limitations came from within, or were 
self-imposed. His sympathies embrace by no means 
all human things, but within the range which they do 
embrace, his eye is no less penetrating and true. 
About nature, it has become so much the fashion to 
rave, there has been so much counterfeit enthusiasm, 
that it is a subject one almost dreads speaking of. But 
whatever it may be to most men, there can be no doubt 
that free nature, mountain solitudes, were as essential 
to Wordsworth's heart, as the air to his lungs. About 
this, nothing he has said goes beyond the simple truth. 
Of his manner of dealing with it in his poetry, the fol- 
lowing things may be noted : — 

First, When he would place some particular land- 
scape before the reader, he does not heap up an ex- 
haustive enumeration of details. Only one or two of 
the most essential features faithfully given, and then 
from these he passes at once to the sentiment, the 
genius of the place, that which gives it individuality, 
and makes it this and no other place. Numerous in- 
stances of the way in which he seizes the inner spirit 
of a place and utters it, will occur to every reader. To 
give one out of many : after sketching briefly the out- 
ward appearance of the four fraternal yew-trees of Bor- 
rowdale, who else could have condensed the total 
impressions into such lines as these, so intensely imag- 
inative, so profoundly true ! — 

M Beneath whose sable roof 
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked 
With unrejoicing berries — ghostly shapes 
May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope, 
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton, 
And Time the Shadow ; there to celebrate, 



54 WORDSWORTH: 

As in a natural temple, scattered o'er 
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
United worship; or in mute repose 
To lie and listen to the mountain flood, 
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves." 

When in this passage, or in that wonderful poem, 
" What, are you stepping westward ? " and many more, 
we find the poet spiritualizing so powerfully the famil- 
iar appearances and common facts of earth, adding, as 
he himself says, — 

*■ The gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the poet's dream," 

one is tempted to ask, Is this true, is the light real, or 
only fantastic ? Now in this, I conceive, lies Words- 
worth's transcendent power, that the ideal light he 
sheds is a true light, and the more ideal it is, the more 
true. Poets, all but the greatest, are apt to adorn 
things with fantastic or individual hues, to suffuse 
them with their own temporary emotions, which Mr. 
Ruskin has called the u pathetic fallacy." The ideal 
light which Wordsworth sheds does not so, but brings 
out only more vividly the real heart of nature, 1 the in- 

1 This expression has been objected to as vague or meaningless. It is 
certainly a condensed form of words, but it aims at expressing a real 
though subtle truth. If asked to explain it, I should do so in this way: 
Each scene in nature has in it a power of awakening in every beholder 
of sensibility, an impression peculiar to itself, such as no other scene can 
exactly call up. This may be called the " heart " or " character v of that 
scene. It is quite analogous to, if somewhat vaguer than, the particular 
impression produced upon us by the presence of each individual man. 
Now the aggregate of the impressions produced by many scenes in nature, 
or rather the power in nature on a large scale of producing such impres- 
sions on us, is what, for want of another name, I have called the 
" heart " of nature. The test of what is the real heart or character of 
any scene is to be ascertained by the experience of what the largest num- 
ber of men of the truest poetic sensibility feel in the presence of that 
scene. What it is in nature which produces these impressions on human 
imaginations I do not undertake to say. But that one cannot explain 
the cause or mode of operation, is no reason why one should not notice 
and name the fact. 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 55 

most feeling, which is really there, and is recognized 
by Wordsworth's eye in virtue of the kinship between 
nature and his soul. If it be asked How is this ? I can 
but reply, that there is a wonderful and mysterious 
adaptation between the external w^orld and the human 
soul, the one answering to the other in ways not yet 
explained by any philosopher. 

Secondly, It is perhaps but turning to another side 
of the same quality to note what a base of natural, 
rather than philosophical idealism lay at the bottom of 
the eye which Wordsworth turned on nature. Whereas 
to most men the material world is a heavy, gross, dead 
mass, earth a ball of black mud, painted here and there 
with some color, Wordsworth felt it to be a living, 
breathing power, not dead, but full of strange life ; his 
eye almost saw into it, as if it were transparent. So 
strongly did this feeling possess him, that in childhood 
he was a complete idealist. Speaking of himself at 
that age, he says, " I was often unable to think of ex- 
ternal things as haviDg external existence, and I com- 
muned with all I saw as something, not apart from, but 
inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times 
while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to 
recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. 
At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later 
periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to 
do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have 
rejoiced over these remembrances." Here is idealism, 
far beyond that of Berkeley or any other philosopher, 
engendered not by subtle arguments of metaphysics, but 
born from within by sheer force of soul, before which 
the solid mass of earth is fused and un substantialized. 
Out of moods like these, or rather the remembrance of 
them, are projected some of his most ideal lights, such 
as form the charm of his finest poems, like the lines to 



56 WORDSWORTH: 

the Cuckoo, and the " Ode on Immortality." Hence 
came the — 

" Obstinate questionings, 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings," 

which he looked back to with thankful joy in mature 
manhood. With these abstract and visionary feelings 
there blended more tender human remembrances of 
that early time, making together a beautiful light of 
morning about his after days, and touching even the 
common things of life with an affecting, tender so- 
lemnity. 

Thirdly, With this spiritualizing power of soul 
Wordsworth combined another faculty, which might 
seem the most opposed to it, — wonderful keenness 
and faithfulness of eye for the minutest facts of the 
outward world. Seldom in his library, much in the 
open air, at all hours, in all seasons, from childhood 
to old age, his watchful observant eye had stored his 
mind with ail the varied and ever-changing aspects 
of nature. His imagination was a treasure-house 
whence he drew forth things new and old, the old as 
fresh as if new. No modern poet has recorded so 
large and so varied a number of natural facts and 
appearances, which had never before been set down 
in books. And these he brings forth, not as if he 
had noted and carefully photographed them, to be 
reproduced whenever an occasion offered, but as famil- 
iar knowledge that had come to him unawares, and 
recurred with the naturalness of an instinct. Many 
no doubt had seen before, but who before him had so 
described the hare ? — 

" The grass is bright with raindrops ; on the moors 
The hare is running races in her mirth; 
And with her feet she from the plashy earth 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 57 

Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun, 

Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run." 

Or again, who else would have noted the effect of 
a leaping trout, or of a croaking raven, in bringing out 
the solitariness of a mountain tarn ? — 

" There sometimes doth a leaping fish 
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; 
The crags repeat the raven's croak 
In symphony austere." 

Or again, in the calm bright evening after a stormy 

day — 

" Loud is the Vale ! the voice is up 

With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
A mighty unison of streams ! 
Of all her voices, one ! 

u Loud is the Vale ! this inland depth 
In peace is roaring like the sea; 
Yon star upon the mountain -top 
Is listening quietly." 

Who but Wordsworth would have set off the uproar 
of the vale by the stillness of the star on the mountain 
head ? Here, in passing, I may note the strange 
power there is in his simple prepositions. The star 
is upon the mountain-top; the silence is in the starry 
sky ; the sleep is among the hills ; " the gentleness 
of heaven is on the sea," not " broods o'er," as the 
later editions have it. This double gift of soul and 
eye, highest ideality and most literal realism combined, 
have made him of all modern poets nature's most un- 
erring interpreter. 1 

Fourthly, Hence it comes that all the moods and 
outgoings of nature are alike open to him ; every kind 

1 No one. that I know, has yet laid his finger on a single mistake 
made by Wordsworth with regard to any appearance of nature, or fact 
in natural history, though keen observers have done this in the case of 
both Walter Scott and Burns. 



58 WORDSWORTH: 

of country renders up to him its secret. He is alike 
true, whether in describing the boundless flats of Salis- 
bury Plain, combs and dells of western Somersetshire, 
fells and lakes of native Cumberland, Yorkshire moors 
and dales, wilder glens of our own Highlands, or the 
pastoral quiet of the Border hills. Who save him 
could have gathered up the whole feeling of Yarrow 
into that consummate stanza, " Meek loveliness," etc., 
etc. ? 

If there is preeminence in any one department, it 
is in the interpretation of his own mountains. This 
is so altogether adequate and profound, that it has 
often seemed as if those dumb old solitudes had, after 
slumbering since the beginning of time, at last waked 
to consciousness in him, and uttered their inmost heart 
through his voice. No other mountains have ever 
had their soul so perfectly expressed. Philosophers 
have dreamed that nature and the human soul are the 
two limbs of a double-clef ted tree, springing from and 
united in one root ; that nature is unconscious soul, 
and the soul is nature become conscious of itself. 
Some such view as this, if it were true, might account 
for the marvelous sympathy there is between Words- 
worth's poetry and the spirit that is in his own moun- 
tains, and for his power of rendering their mute being 
into his solemn melodies. 

But it - is now time to look at that other side of 
things in which his vitality of imagination is seen. 
His meditative eye penetrates not less deep when 
turned on the heart and character of man, than when 
it contemplates the face of nature. It has, however, 
been already noted, that while in the latter depart- 
ment his range is limitless, in the former it is not 
only restricted, but restricted within very marked and 
definite bounds. For man as he is found in cities, 



TEE MAN AND TEE POET. 59 

or as he appears in the complex conditions of advanced 
civilization, Wordsworth cares little ; he turns his back 
on the streets, the drawing-rooms, the mart, and the 
'change, but lovingly enters the cottage and the farm, 
and walks with the shepherd on his hills, or the va- 
grant on lonelv roads. The choice of his characters 
from humble and rustic life was caused partly by the 
original make of his nature, partly from his early 
training, which made him more at home with these 
than with artificial man, partly also from that repub- 
lican fervor which he imbibed in his opening manhood. 
He believed that in country people what is permanent 
in human nature, the essential feelings and passions 
of mankind, exist in greater simplicity and strength. 
Their manners, he thought, spring more directly from 
such feeling, and more faithfully express them. Their 
lives and occupations too are u with grandeur circum- 
fused." Thus they are invested with a glory, beyond 
others, from the background of wild and beautiful na- 
ture against which they are seen. These are the rea- 
sons he gives for selecting his subjects from humble 
life, and within this range he, for the most part, con- 
fines himself. There is still another limitation. Even 
in these characters he is not so much at home in deal- 
ing with their trivial outside appearance, or little 
laughable peculiarities of manner or costume. He has 
small caring for these things, and when he sets to de- 
scribe them he often fails, as in the " Idiot Boy " per- 
haps, and in u Goody Blake." A few touches of real 
humor would have wonderfully relieved these person- 
ages, but this Wordsworth has not to give. He can- 
not, as Burns often does, exhibit his humble characters 
dramaticallv. does not lausdi and sin£, much less drink, 
with his peasants ; he is not quite one of themselves, 
sharing their thoughts, and having no other and higher 



60 WORDSWORTH: 

thoughts. What he sets himself to portray is their 
serious feelings, the deep things of their souls, that in 
which the peasant and the peer are one, and in which, 
as Wordsworth thinks, the advantage may often lie 
with the former. He has, as Coleridge has said, " deep 
sympathy with man as man ; but it is the sympathy 
of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co- 
mate ; but of a contemplator from whose view no dif- 
ference of rank conceals the sameness of nature ; no 
injuries of time and weather, of toil, or even of igno- 
rance, wholly disguise the human face divine." In 
fact it is the moral and spiritual part of man which 
he most sees and feels, and other things are interesting 
chiefly as they affect this. His thoughts dwell in — 

" The depth, and not the tumult of the soul," 

not on the surface manners, nor on the effervescent and 
transitory emotions, but on those which are steadfast 
and forever. It is in virtue of his deep insight into 
these, that common incidents assume for him an impor- 
tance and interest which to less reflective men has 
seemed exasperated or sometimes even ludicrous. The 
reflections, however, which they awake in him are not 
only true and deep, but they are such as add new 
dignity or tenderness to human life. A frail old man 
thanked him fervently for cutting through for him at a 
blow an old root, which he had long been haggling at 
in vain. The tears in the old man's eyes drew out 
from Wordsworth this reflection — 

" I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
With coldness still returning; 
Alas ! the gratitude of men 

Hath oftener left me mourning." 

In setting forth such characters as The Brothers, 
Michael, the Cumberland Beggar, etc., etc. (though in 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 61 

the last of these there is somewhat too much moraliz- 
ing), he gives them not only as common acquaintances 
see them, or as they appear to themselves ; this he 
does, but something more. He lets us see them in 
their relations to those unseen laws of the moral world, 
of which they themselves may be unaware, but which 
they suggest to the inspired insight of the poet. And 
in this way the emotions called forth by the sight of 
suffering do not end in mere emotion, but strike into a 
more enduring, that is, a moral ground, and so are 
idealized and relieved. This moral vision has a 
wonderful power to elevate, often to solemnize, things, 
the lowliest and most familiar. It has been said that 
Burns has caused many an eye to look on the poorest 
thatched cottage of the Scottish peasantry with a feel- 
ing which, but for Burns, the beholder had never 
known. The same may be said of Wordsworth, with a 
difference. He has revealed, in the homeliest aspects 
of humble life, a beauty and worth not recognized be- 
fore, or long forgotten. He has opened for men new 
sources of interest in their kind, not only in shepherds 
and peasants, but in tattered beggars, and gypsies, and 
wayworn tramps. 

Much stuff has been talked and written about Words- 
worth being a merely subjective poet. Critics had 
good need to be sure they were right before they char- 
acterize great poets by such vague, abstract words ; for 
they quickly get into the minds of the reading public, 
and stick there, and do much mischief. True it is that 
Wordsworth has read his own soul, not that which was 
accidental or peculiar in him, but that which he had in 
common with all high and imaginative men. But is 
this all ? has he done nothing more ? If ever man 
caught the soul of things, not himself, and expressed it, 
Wordsworth did. That he has done it in nature almost 



62 WORDSWORTH: 

liuiitlessly we have seen. In man lie has done it not 
less truly, though more restricted! y. Taking the re- 
strictions at their utmost, what contemporary poet (I 
do not speak of Scott in his novels) has left to his 
country such a gallery of new and individual portraits 
as a permanent possession ? The deeper side of char- 
acter no doubt it is, — the heart of men, not their 
clothes, — but it is character in which there is nothing 
of himself, nothing which all men might not or do not 
share. The affliction of Margaret, the Mad Mother, 
Gypsies, Laodamia, the Highland Reaper, the Wag- 
oner, Peter Bell, Matthew, Michael, the Cumberland 
Beggar, all the tenants of the Churchyard among the 
Mountains — what are these? What, but so many 
separate, individual, outstanding portraits, into which 
all of himself that enters is only the eye that can see 
and read their souls on their deeper side. For it is 
not their outward contour, nor their complexion, nor 
dress, he busies himself with. He painted, as Titian 
and Leonardo did their great portraits, with the deeper 
soul predominating in the countenance. If he seized 
this, he cared little for the rest. Let us discard, then, 
that foolish talk about Wordsworth as a merely subjec- 
tive poet, who could give nothing but his own feelings, 
or copies of his own countenance. 

There are many other aspects in which this vital 
power of imagination in Wordsworth might be viewed. 
Only one more of these I must note, and then pass on. 
He pushed the domain of poetry into a whole field of 
subjects hitherto un approached by the poets. In him, 
perhaps more than any other contemporary writer 
either of prose or verse, we see the highest spirit of 
this century, in its contrast with that of the preceding, 
summed up and condensed. What most strikes one, in 
recurring to the poetry of the Pope and Addison period, 



THE MAN AND TEE POET. 63 

is its external character, and the limited range of sub- 
jects which it dealt with. In the writings of that time, 
the play of the intellect is little leavened by sentiment, 
little of individual character is suffered to transpire. 
The heart, it would seem, was either dormant, or kept 
under strict surveillance, and not allowed to interfere 
with the working of the understanding. Literature 
appeared like a well-bred, elderly gentleman in ruffles 
and peruke, of polished but somewhat chilling manners, 
which meet all warmth of feeling with the frost of 
etiquette. And just as in such society conversation is 
restricted to certain subjects, of these touches but the 
surface, and does even that in set phrases, so it was 
with the literature of the golden days of Queen Anne 
and the first two Georges. From this very limitation 
in the range both of subjects and treatment, there arose 
in the hands of the masters a perfection of style within 
these limits ; just as in the finitude of Grecian archi- 
tecture, perfection is more easily attained than in 
Gothic with its infinite aims. In the writers who 
followed, so-called classicism degenerated into conven- 
tionality in subject, in treatment, and in language. In 
Cowper, as has been said, we see the beginning of the 
recoil. But it was by Wordsworth that the revolt was 
most openly proclaimed and most fully carried out. 
The changed spirit was no doubt in the time, and would 
have made its way independently of any single man. 
But no one power could have helped it forward more 
effectually than the capacious and inward-seeing soul of 
Wordsworth. Whereas the poetry of the former age 
had dealt mainly with the outside of things, or if it 
sometimes went further, did so with such a stereotyped 
manner and diction as to make it look like external 
work, Wordsworth everywhere went straight to the 
inside of things. We have seen already how, whether 



64 WORDSWORTH: 

in his own self-revelations, or in his descriptions of the 
visible creation, or in his delineations of men, he passed 
always from the surface to the centre, from the outside 
looks to the inward character. This one characteristic 
set him in entire opposition to the art of ]ast century. 
Out of it arose the entire revolution he made in sub- 
jects, treatment, and diction. Seeing in many things 
which had hitherto been deemed unfit subjects for poe- 
try, a deeper truth and beauty than in those which had 
hitherto been most handled by the poets, he reclaimed 
from the wilderness vast tracts that had been lying 
waste, and brought them within the poetic domain. In 
this way he has done a wider service to poetry than 
any other poet of his time, but since him no one has 
arisen of spirit strong and large enough to make full 
proof of the liberty he bequeathed. 

The same freedom, and by dint of the same powers, 
he won for future poets with regard to the language 
of poetry. He was the first who both in theory and 
practice entirely shook off the trammels of the so-called 
poetic diction which had tyrannized over English 
poetry for more than a century. This diction of course 
exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode 
of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled 
against this conventionality of spirit, so against the 
outward expression of it. The whole of the stock 
phrases and used-up metaphors he discarded, and re- 
turned to living language of natural feeling, as it is 
used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had 
got stereotyped in books. And just as in his subjects 
he had taken in from the waste much virgin soil, so in 
his diction he appropriated for poetic use a large 
amount of words, idioms, metaphors, till then by the 
poets disallowed. In doing so, he may here and there 
have made a mistake, the homelv trenching on the 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 65 

ludicrous, as in the lines about the washing-tub and 
some others, long current in the ribaldry of critics. 
But, bating a few almost necessary failures, he did 
more than any other by his usage and example to 
reanimate the effete language of poetry, and restore to 
it healthfullness, strength, and feeling. His shorter 
poems, both the earlier and the later, are for the most 
part very models of natural, powerful, and yet sensitive 
English ; the language being like a garment woven 
out of and transparent with the thought. Of the 
diction of his longer blank verse poems, which is far 
from being so faultless, I shall have something to say 
in the sequel. 

As to the theory which he propounds in his famous 
Preface, that the language of poetry ought nowise to 
differ from that of prose, this is only his protest against 
the old poetic phraseology, too sweepingly laid down. 
His own practice is the best commentary on, and anti- 
dote to, his theory, where he has urged it to an ex- 
treme. Coleridge and De Quincey have both criticised 
the " Preface " severely, so that in their hands it 
would seem to contain either a paradox or a truism. 
Into this subject I cannot now enter. This only may 
be said on the Wordsworthian side, as against these 
critics, that while the language of prose receives new 
life and strength by adopting the idioms and phrases 
used in the present conversation of educated men, that 
of poetry may go further, and borrow with advantage 
the language from cottage firesides. Who has ever 
listened to a peasant father or mother describing the 
last illness of one of their own children, or speaking 
of those who were gone, without having heard from 
their lips words which, for natural and expressive 
feeling, were the very essence of poetry ! Poets may 
5 



66 WORDSWORTH: 

well adopt these, for, if they trust to their own re- 
sources, they can invent nothing equal to them. 

These reflections on the main characteristics of 
Wordsworth arose out of a survey of the poems 
written during his first Grasmere period. But they 
have passed beyond the bounds for which they were 
originally intended, and may apply in large measure to 
his poems of the second period, written at Allan Bank 
in Grasmere, and during his first years at Rydal 
Mount. These were u The Excursion," " The White 
Doe of Rylstone," " The Duddon Sonnets," and some 
smaller poems. In these there is perhaps less of that 
ethereal light, that spiritualizing power shed over 
nature, which forms the peculiar charm of the best of 
his earlier poems. But if there is less penetrating 
interpretation of nature, there is a deepened moral 
wisdom, a larger entering into the heart of universal 
man. I spoke above of the limitations of his earlier 
poetry in this latter region. These in his later poems 
are perhaps less apparent, partly from the expansion 
of the philosophic mind by years of meditation, and by 
kindly though limited intercourse with men ; partly 
from a gradual lessening of the exclusive bias towards 
humble life, as his Republican fervor abated. 

To discuss " The Excursion," as its importance de- 
mands, would require a long separate treatise. It was 
a theme worthy of a great philosophic poem, which 
Wordsworth proposed to himself. A being, like the 
Solitary, by domestic bereavement, and by ardent hopes 
of the first French Revolution, too rudely disappointed, 
driven into skepticism and despondency — how can 
such an one win his way back to sympathy with man, 
and to faith in God ? The outward circumstances of 
such a subject may vary, but itself is of perennial im- 
port. French Revolutions may not repeat themselves 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 67 

with every generation, but unbelieving cynicism is an 
evil of continual recurrence, — an evil which is not 
checked by, but would rather seem increasingly to at- 
tend on, our much vaunted march of mind. As to the 
poet's way of dealing with the problem, there is ground 
for the disappointment which many have felt, that the 
truths of revelation, though everywhere acknowledged, 
are nowhere brought prominently forward. It is the 
religion which the poet has extracted from nature and 
man's moral instincts on which he mainly dwells ; yet 
it is such a religion, so pure and so elevated, as these 
sources, but for the light they draw from the revelation 
close at hand, never could have supplied. In the crisis 
of the poem, when the poet has to apply his medicine 
to the mind diseased, and when the Solitary is importu- 
nate for an answer, the poet turns aside, and recom- 
mends communion with nature, and free intercourse 
with men, in a way which to many has seemed like a 
disavowal of the power of Christian faith. This seems, 
however, too severe a judgment. Wordsworth knew 
clearly that there are many cases in which, as the pas- 
sages to the heart have been closed by false reasonings 
and morbid views, the way to it is not to be found by 
any direct arguments, however true. What is wanted 
is some antidote which shall bring back the feelings to 
a healthful tone, remove obstructions from within, and 
so, through restored health of heart, put the under- 
standing in a condition which is open to the power of 
truth. Awaken healthful sensibilities in the heart, and 
a right state of intellect will be sure to follow. This 
is Wordsworth's moral pathology. And the restorative 
discipline he recommends is that which in his own 
mental trial he had found effectual. This I believe to 
be the true account ; and yet one cannot help thinking 
there was not only room, but even a call for a fuller 



68 WORDSWORTH: 

acknowledgment of the Christian verities. The defect 
probably arose from the poet's carrying his own expe- 
rience, and his peculiar views about the sanative power 
of nature, further than they hold true, at least for the 
majority of men. While such is the advice given to 
the Solitary, the course practically taken is to lead him 
to the churchyard among the mountains at Grasmere, 
there to hear from the lips of the pastor how they lived 
and died, the lowly tenants of the surrounding graves, 
in order that hearing he may learn — 

u To prize the breath we share with human kind ; 
And look upon the dust of man with awe." 

To many who little care for the philosophy, " The 
Excursion " will always be dear for the pictures of 
mountain scenes, and the pathetic records of rural life 
which it contains. The two books of the " Churchyard 
among the Mountains," are beyond all the others sus- 
tained in interest, and perfect in style. In themselves 
they form a noble poem, full of deep insight into the 
heart, of attractive portraits of character, and of tender 
and elevating views of human life and destiny. No 
one with a heart to feel can read them carefully with- 
out being the better for it. Of all the lives there por- 
trayed, perhaps there is none which goes so straight to 
the heart as the affecting story of Ellen : — 

M As, on a sunny bank, a tender lamb 
Lurks in safe shelter from the winds of March, 
Screened by its parent, so that little mound 
Lies guarded by its neighbor; the small heap 
Speaks for itself; an Infant there doth rest; 
The sheltering hillock is the Mother's grave. 
If mild discourse, and manners that conferred 
A natural dignity on humblest rank ; 
If gladsome spirits, and benignant looks, 
That for a face not beautiful did more 
Than beauty for the fairest face can do; 
And if religious tenderness of heart, 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 69 

Grieving for sin, and penitential tears 

Shed when the clouds had gathered and disstained 

The spotless ether of a maiden life ; 

If these may make a hallowed spot of earth 

More holy in the sight of God or man ; 

Then, on that mound, a sanctity shall brood 

Till the stars sicken at the day of doom." 

Then follows the character of the cottage girl, her 
love, betrayal, the broken vow ; her shame and sorrow, 
relief by the birth of her child, the necessity to leave 
her own and nurse a neighbor's ; her own child's sick- 
ness, and her cruelly enforced absence from it; its 
death, her long vigils by its grave, a weeping Magda- 
lene — ended by her own decline : — 

" Meek saint ! through patience glorified on earth ! 

In whom, as by her lonely hearth she sate 

The ghastly face of cold decay put on 

A sun-like beauty, and appeared divine ! 
She said, 
* He who afflicts me knows what I can bear; 

And, when I fail, and can endure no more, 

Will mercifully take me to Himself.' 

So through the cloud of death her spirit passed 

Into that pure and unknown world of love 

Where injury cannot come." 

They say that Wordsworth wants passion. For 
feeling, not on the surface but in the depth, pathos pure 
and profound, what of modern verse can equal this 
story and that of Margaret? The very roll of these 
lines above quoted is oracular. There is in them the 
echo of a soul the most capacious, tender, and profound, 
that has spoken through modern poetry. 

The mention of these lines suggests one word in 
passing, on Wordsworth's blank verse. In " The Ex- 
cursion," and more still in " The Prelude," it often 
greatly needs condensation, may even be said to be 
tediously prolix. When speaking of homely matters, 
there is circumlocution at times amounting to awk- 



70 WORDSWORTH: 

wardness ; and when philosophizing there is, unlike the 
smaller poems, too profuse a use of long-winded Latin 
words, to the neglect of the mother Saxon. Yet, even 
in these passages, there is hardly a page without some 
atoning lines in the true Wordsworthian mould. Even 
in those disquisitions of " The Excursion " which seem 
most prosy, as the paragraphs on a system of National 
Education, there are seldom wanting some of those 
glances of deeper vision, by which old neglected truths 
are flashed with new power on the consciousness, or 
new relations of truth, which had hitherto lain hidden, 
are for the first time revealed. Of such apothegms 
of moral wisdom, how large a number could be gleaned 
from that poem alone ! But it is in the passages where 
Wordsworth's inspiration kindles that the full power 
of his blank verse is to be seen. Wordsworth's blank 
verse, so prolix in ordinary narrative, so grand in its 
loftier passages, brings forcibly to mind what I once 
heard Hartley Coleridge say of his whole poetry. 
When employed to do a hackney's work along the 
common highway, he stumbles and blunders at almost 
every step ; it is only when he strikes a higher strain 
and " soars steadily into the region " that you discover 
him to be a veritable Pegasus. His blank verse is 
seen at its best in such passages of " The Excursion " 
as these: The Wanderer's account of his own feelings 
when, a boy, he watched the sunrise over Athole, and 
indeed the whole description of his boyhood ; the story 
of Margaret, already spoken of; the description of the 
Langdale Pikes ; the Solitary's history of himself ; the 
Wanderer's advice to him at the close of Despondency 
Corrected ; and I may add, almost the whole of the 
two books of the Churchyard. On the characters who 
form the chief speakers in the poem, the Pedlar or 
Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor, I cannot now 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 71 

dwell. Those who wish to see from what materials 
Wordsworth framed them, will find some interesting 
memoranda from his own lips, contained in the biogra- 
phy by his nephew, and now incorporated in the edition 
of his Poems of 1857. It seems strange to look back 
to the outcry that was long made against the employ- 
ment of a pedlar as the chief figure of the poem. That 
this should now seem to most quite natural, or at least 
noways offensive, may serve to mark the change in 
literary feeling which Wordsworth himself did so much 
to introduce. 

"The Excursion" was published in 1814, and the 
following year brought to light another long poem, 
" The White Doe of Ry Is tone." A great part of it, 
however, had been composed as early as 1807, while 
Wordsworth was on a visit to his wife's family at 
Sockburn-upon-Tees. Whether he then visited Bol- 
ton Abbey and its neighborhood for the first time 
does not appear. This poem, pronounced by the great 
critic of the day to be " the very worst poem he ever 
saw imprinted in a quarto volume, ' has a very be- 
witching and unique charm of its own. The scene 
is laid in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and begins and 
ends with Bolton Priory, and the story of a white doe 
which haunts it. This doe had been the favorite of 
Emily Norton, sole daughter of Richard Norton of 
Rylstone Hall, who, with his eight sons, had marched 
forth in the army of the Catholic Lords engaged in 
the insurrection known as the Rising of the North. 
Emily and a ninth son, Francis, were of the Protestant 
faith, and disapproved of the enterprise. But he, 
without taking part in the expedition, follows his 
father, to be of what use he can ; sees him and his 
eight brothers led to execution, and is himself accident- 
ally slain, and buried in Bolton Priory. The sister's 



72 WORDSWORTH: 

lot is to remain behind, to hear of the utter extinction 
of her house, and by force of passive fortitude, — 

" To abide 
The shock, and finally secure 
O'er pain and grief a triumph pure." 

The white doe, which had been her companion in 
happier days, comes to her side .and seems to enter 
into her sorrow, attends her when on moonlight nights 
she visits Bolton Abbey, and her brothers' grave, and 
long years after she is gone continues to haunt the 
hallowed place and couch by that same grave. " Every- 
thing attempted by the principal personages fails iu 
its material effects, succeeds in its moral and spiritual." 
This is Wordsworth's own account of it. Certainly 
the active and warlike parts of the poem are need- 
lessly tame and unexciting, forming a marked contrast 
with the way Scott would have handled the same sub- 
jects. That Wordsworth could, if he had chosen, 
have improved these parts of his poem, there can be 
no doubt, for the song of " Brougham Castle," and 
several of the warlike sonnets prove that he could, 
when so minded, strike a Tyrtaean strain. But if, in 
" The White Doe," he fails where Scott would have 
succeeded, he does what neither Scott nor any one 
else could equally have done. It is, in truth, a poem 
not of action at all, but entirely of sentiment, and sen- 
timent as deep as life. Gazing on Bolton's ruined 
abbey, as it stands on its * green holm, looked down on 
by majestic woods and quiet uplands, and lulled by the 
murmuring Wharf, his whole heart is filled by the 
impressive and hallowed scene. And all the feelings 
awakened within him he gathers up and concentrates 
in this legendary creature, making her at every turn, 
whether passing into shadow under broken arch, or 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 73 

throwing a gleam into gloomy vault, or crouching in 
the moonlight on the last Norton's green grave, bring 
out some new lineament, call up some fair imagination. 
She is the most perfectly ideal embodiment of the 
finer spirit of the place that it could have entered into 
poet's heart to conceive. 

Of " Peter Bell " and " The Wagoner," both com- 
posed long before, but published after " The White 
Doe," I have not now space to say one word. At the 
time when he was preparing his eldest son for college, 
Wordsworth studied carefully several of the Latin 
poets, which led to his attempting two or three poems 
on classical subjects. One of these, " Laodamia," will 
always stand out prominent even among his happiest 
productions. Throwing himself naturally into the sit- 
uation, he informs the old Achaian legend with a fine 
moral dignity peculiarly his own : — 

" Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, 
Brought from a pensive, though a happy place.'' 

At the same time there is a visible change from the 
simple homespun Saxon diction of the lyrical ballads 
to a more fall-mouth amplitude which suited well such 
a subject as " Laodamia," but which grew upon him 
more and more till it became verbosity. 

And now but a word on the third period of Words- 
worth's poetry. This began, one may say, about the 
year 1820, and lasted till the close of his poetic life. 
It was the time when he wrote the "Ecclesiastical 
Sonnets," which, though containing here and there 
some gems, — such as that on " Old Abbeys " — 

" Once ye were holy, ye are holy still ; 
Your spirit freely let me drink, and live; " 

are not, on the whole, equal to many of his earlier 
ones. Sonnet writing begun at Grasmere, had long 



74 WORDSWORTH: 

been a favorite relaxation with him in the midst of 
larger works. The sonnets are like small off-lets from 
the main stream of his poetry, into which whatever 
thoughts from time to time arose might overflow. 
This form is well fitted for the detached musings of a 
meditative poet. As each new thought awakes, a new 
form for it has not to be sought, the mould is here 
ready, and all the poet has to do is to cast the liquid 
metal into it. Wordsworth's sonnets are so numerous 
and so important that they form quite a literature, 
which, if justice were done them, would demand an ex- 
tended notice for themselves. The rest of the poems 
of this epoch are memorials of four separate tours : 
two on the Continent in 1830 and 1837, two in Scot- 
land in 1831 and 1833. Taken as a whole, none of 
these tours produced anything equal to his earliest one 
in Scotland. But the former of the two continental 
tours produced one poem almost equal to any of his 
prime, that on the Eclipse in 1820. The description 
there of Milan Cathedral, with its white hosts of angels, 
and its starry zone, — 

" All steeped in that portentous light, 
All suffering dim eclipse," 

is in his finest later style. 

But that among all these later poems which most 
wins regard is the beautiful and affecting thread of 
allusion to Walter Scott that runs through them. 
Open-minded appreciation of contemporary poets was 
not one of Wordsworth's strong points. A very 
marked one-sidedness, not hard to explain, arose out 
of at once his weakness and his strength. Disparag- 
ing remarks about Scott's poetry were reported from 
his conversation, and these seem to have been present 
to Lockhart's thought as he penned his last notice of 



THE MAN AND THE POET. lb 

Wordsworth. He might have recalled at the same 
time the many kind and beautiful lines in which he 
who never said in verse what he did not truly feel, has 
embodied his feelings about Scott. Wordsworth had 
cordially welcomed " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," 
and always continued to like it best of Scott's poems. 
He and the " Shirra " first met in the latter's house in 
Lasswade, just after Wordsworth and his sister had 
left Yarrow un visited — 

u For when we're there, although 'tis fair, 
'Twill be another Yarrow/' 

In 1814, as he descended from Traquair accom- 
panied by the Ettrick Shepherd, he exclaimed — 

"And is this — Yarrow ? — This the stream 
Of which my fancy cherished, 
So faithfully a waking dream? 
An image that hath perished ! " 

In September 1831, Wordsworth and his daughter 
Dora set out on a visit to Abbotsford, to see Scott 
once more before the latter left Tweedside for Italy in 
hopes of repairing there his broken health. It was a 
brief visit, as Scott was on the very eve of his depart- 
ure, but. ere they parted, they snatched one more 
look at Yarrow, — the last both for Scott and Words- 
worth : — 

" Once more, by Newark's Castle-gate 
Long left without a warder. 
I stood, looked, listened, and with thee, 
Great Minstrel of the Border." 

And though the hand of sickness lay heavy upon Scott, 
they did their best — 

" To make a day of happy hours, 
Their happy days recalling." 

But throughout the " Yarrow Revisited," written in 
remembrance of that day, there is visible the pressure 



7G WORDSWORTH: 

of an actual grief, little in harmony with the pensive 
ideal light that is upon the two former Yarrows. " On 
our return in the afternoon," says Wordsworth, " we 
had to cross Tweed (by the old ford) directly opposite 
Abbotsford. The wheels of our carriage grated upon 
the pebbles in the bed of the stream that there flows 
somewhat rapidly. A rich, but sad light, of rather a 
purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon 
Hills at that moment, and thinking it probable that it 
might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the 
stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some 
of my feelings in the sonnet beginning — 

" • A trouble not of clouds, or weeping rain.' " 

This is the noble sonnet in which he says — 

« The might 
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes; 
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue 
Than sceptred king or laureled conqueror knows, 
Follow this wondrous Potentate." 

" At noon, on Thursday," Wordsworth continues, 
" we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day 
Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation tete-a-tete, 
when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, 
upon the whole, he had led. He had written in my 
daughter's album before he came into the breakfast- 
room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her ; 
and while putting the book into her hand, in his own 
study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my pres- 
ence, 'I should not have done anything of this kind, 
but for your father's sake — they are probably the last 
verses I shall ever write.' " And they were the very 
last I remember one most affecting stanza of these 
lines, which I heard long ago from one who had seen 
them in the album, — that same album which contained 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 77 

autograph and unpublished lines written by Coleridge, 
Southey, and other poets of the time, for Wordsworth's 
daughter. When I wrote this two years ago, the lines 
had never been made public ; and therefore I felt that 
I had no right to give the stanza which I remembered. 
Since then, Bishop Wordsworth has quoted it in a 
published letter, and the seal of secrecy is thus re- 
moved. The allusion is to Scott's early friendship 
with Wordsworth : — 

" Tis well the gifted eye which saw 

The first faint sparks of genius burn, 
Should mark its latest flash with awe, 
Low glimmering from its funeral urn." 

They who wish to see all the four stanzas will find 
them, along with an interesting note, in the " Selections 
from the Works of Scott," lately edited by Mr. Morti- 
mer Collins, in Moxon's " Miniature Poets." 

During the same journey, Wordsworth seems to have 
revisited, besides Yarrow, other places in Scotland, 
which he had seen and sung in his earlier day. Among 
these he again passed through the Trosachs, bright with 
their autumnal glory. The record of this visit is that 
sonnet, so full of the calm, yet not mournful meditation 
which that season brings everywhere, and especially in 
such a place, deepened, perhaps, by his feeling for the 
Border Minstrel from whom he had just parted : — 

" There's not a nook within this solemn Pass, 
But were an apt confessional for one 
Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone, 
That life is but a tale of morning grass 
Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase 
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes 
Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities, 
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes mare clear than glass 
Untouched, unbreathed upon." 

Compare this with the stave which Wordsworth 
chanted on the same ground long before, when — 



78 WORDSWORTH: 

M Stepping westward seemed to be 
A kind of heavenly destiny : 
I liked the greeting ; 'twas a sound 
Of something without place or hound, 
And seemed to give me spiritual right 
To travel through that region bright. 
The voice was soft, and she who spike 
Was walking by her native lake ; 
The salutation had to me 
The very sound of courtesy: 
Its power was felt, and while my eye 
Was fixed upon the glowing sky, 
The echo of the voice en wrought 
A human sweetness with the thought 
Of travelling through the wo Id that lay 
Before me in my endless way." 



Between the sonnet and these lines, the one in his best 
early, the other in his best latest style, you have the 
whole difference between the vernal hopefulness, the 
ethereal ideality of his prime, and the sober coloring, 
the more chastened feeling which thirty years had 
brought. 

Once again, in 1833, Wordsworth visited Scotland, 
but by that time Scott was lying in the ruined aisle at 
Dryburgh, within sound of his own Tweed. Two 
years after this, in the autumn of 1885, on hearing of 
the death of the Ettrick Shepherd, he poured forth 
that fine lament over his brother poets who had fol- 
lowed each other so fast " from sunshine to the sunless 
land." In it he alludes once again to his two visits to 
Yarrow, the one with the shepherd-poet for his guide, 
the other with Sir Walter. 

Once more, the last time, when on a tour in Italy in 
1837, amid the " Musings near Aquapendente," his 
heart reverts to Scott. Seeing the broom in flower on 
an Italian hill-side, his thoughts turned homeward to 
think how it would be budding on Fairfield and Hel- 
vellyn. Then the thought strikes him, what use of 



THE MAN AND THE POET, 79 

coming so far to see these new scenes, if his thoughts 
kept wandering back to the old ones ? 

" The skirt of Greenside fell, 
And by Glenridding-screes, and low Glencoign, 
Places forsaken now, though loving still 
The Muses, as they loved them in the days 
Of the old minstrels and the border bards." 

One there was, he says, who would have sympathized 
with him — 

" Not the less 
Had his sunk eye kindled at those dear words 
That spake of bards and minstrels ; and his spirit 
Had flown with mine to old Helvellyn's brow, 
Where once together, in his day of strength, 
We stood rejoicinor, as if earth were free 
From sorrow like the sky above our heads." 

He alludes to the day, then thirty years gone, when 
Sir Walter, Sir Humphry Davy, and Wordsworth had 
ascended Helvellyn together. Then he goes on : — 

44 Years followed years, and when, upon the eve 
Of his last going from Tweedside, thought turned, 
Or by another's sympathy was led 
To this bright land, Hope was for him no friend, 
Knowledge no help ; Imagination shaped 
No promise. Still, in more than ear-deep seats, 
Survives for me, and cannot but survive 
The tone of voice which wed.led borrowed words 
To sadness not their own, when, with faint smile 
Forced by intent to take from speech its edge, 
He said, ' When I am there, although 'tis fair, 
Twill be another Yarrow.' . . . 

44 Peace to his spirit ! why should Poesy 
Yield to the lure of vain regret, and hover 
In gloom on wings with confidence outspread 
To move in sunshine! Utter thanks, my soul! 
Tempered with awe, and sweetened by compassion 
For them who in the shades of sorrow dwell, 
That I — so near the term to human life 
Appointed by man's common heritage — 
Am free to rove where Nature's loveliest looks, 
Art's noblest relics, history's rich bequests, 



80 WORDSWORTH: 

Failed to reanimate and but feebly cheered 
The whole world's Darling." 

This poem, and the one suggested by Hogg's death, 
burst out from the somewhat tamer reflections of his 
later days as the last gleams of his old fervor. Hence- 
forth he wrote little more poetry, but he continued 
almost to the end to keep retouching his former poems. 
Careful as he had always been in the work of composi- 
tion, he went over them again and again in his later 
years, changing them here and there, but seldom for 
the better. What seemed asperities were smoothed 
away, but for the most part the original ruggedness is 
poorly exchanged for the more faultless, but tamer, 
afterthought. It would be an interesting, and for those 
who make a study of these things a profitable, task, to 
bring together, by comparing one edition with another, 
the successive changes which many well-known lines 
were in this way made to endure. One or two speci- 
mens only must now suffice. In " The Solitary Reap- 
er," instead of the strong vernacular line — 
« I listened, till I had my fill," 

of the original edition, we now have the faultless, but 
tame — 

" I listened, motionless and still." 

Again, in the poem describing Mary Hutchinson, — 

" And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light," 

there is one change to " angelic light," and in another 
edition I think I have seen " celestial light." Again, 
in that consummate sonnet, beginning — 

" It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," 

some one had suggested that beauteous is an album 
word, and so the first line was tortured into — 



THE MAN AND THE POET, 81 

" A fairer face of heaven could not be; " 

and again into something like this — 

" From fret and stir the clouds are free," 

as I remember once seeing it printed. Happily the 
original line is now restored. But in the same sonnet 
the first form of the line — 

" The gentleness of heaven is on the sea," 

with its transparent simplicity, has been finally super- 
seded by the more commonplace — 

" The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea." 

During those silent years, the aged poet might be 
seen in green old age (and who that has seen that 
venerable figure will forget it ?), either as he moved 
about the roads in the neighborhood of Rydal Mount, 
or drove towards Grasmere or Ambleside in his small, 
rustic-looking phaeton, or as he appeared on Sundays, 
in the corner of the family pew near the pulpit, in the 
small church of Rydal. There, Sunday by Sunday, he 
was seated, his head inclining forwards, and the long 
silver white hair like a crown of glory on either side 
of the broad majestic brow. 

Towards the close of 1847, the household at Rydal 
Mount was darkened by a great grief, the death of the 
poet's daughter Dora, Mrs. Quillinan. " Our sorrow, 
I feel, is for life," he wrote, " but God's will be done ! " 
And it was for life. At the age of seventy-seven such 
a loss was not to be got over. Still, with firm step, 
though saddened heart, he might* be seen going about. 
As late as the autumn of 1849, as a stranger came 
down the road from the back of Rydal Mount, he met 
Wordsworth walking slowly back towards his house 
from the highway, to which he had just conducted some 
visitors. His head leant to one side, somewhat as it 
6 



82 WORDSWORTH: 

does in his picture, and in his hand he carried a branch 
with withered leaves. He who passed him happened 
to have on a plaid, wrapt round him in Scottish shep- 
herd's fashion. This attracted his notice, and as the 
stranger looked round, thinking it might be the last 
sight he should ever have of him, the poet had turned 
round, and was looking back too. There was one long 
look, but no word, and both passed on. 

" Matthew is in his grave, yet now, 
Methinks, I see him stand, 
As at that moment, with a bough 
Of wilding in his hand." 

In the March of next year he was still able to walk 
to Grasmere and to Ambleside, the last two walks he 
took. The last day he was out of doors, he sat down 
on the stone seat of a cottage porch, where he had been 
calling, and watched the setting sun. It was a cold, 
bright evening, and he got a chill which resulted in 
pleurisy. He survived the attack, but sank from after 
weakness. On the 7th of April, his eightieth birthday, 
he was prayed for in Rydal chapel, morning and even- 
ing. On Saturday, the 20th, when asked by his son 
whether he would receive the communion, he replied, 
" That is just what I want." When his wife wished to 
let him know that there was no hope of recovery, she 
said to him, " William, you are going to Dora." He 
made no answer at the time, but next day, as one of 
his nieces drew aside his curtain, he awoke from a quiet 
sleep, and said, " Is that Dora ? " He breathed his 
last, almost imperceptibly, on Tuesday the 23d of April, 
exactly at noon, the same day as that on which Shake- 
speare was born and died. 

A few days after, he was laid in that corner of Gras- 
mere churchyard where his children had been laid be- 
fore him, and to which his wife and sister have since 



THE MAN AND TEE POET. 83 

been gathered. A plain blue stone, with no other word 
on it than " William Wordsworth," marks the spot. 
On one side of it are the eight yew-trees planted there 
long before, under his direction, and carefully tended 
by himself. On the other, the Rotha, through a clear, 
calm, deep pool, creeps quietly by. Fairfield, Helm- 
crag, and Silver-How look down upon his grave. 
Westminster contains no resting-place so fit for him. 

And now, looking back on those fourscore years, 
may it not be said that if any life in modern times has 
been well-rounded and complete, Wordsworth's was ? 
From first to last it was one noble purpose, faithfully 
kept, thoroughly fulfilled. The world has rarely seen 
so strong and capacious a soul devote itself to one, and 
that a lofty end, with such singleness and concentration 
of aim. No doubt there was a great original mind to 
begin with, one that saw more things, and deeper, than 
any other poet of his time. But what would this have 
achieved, had it not been backed by that moral strength, 
that ironness of resolve ? It was this that enabled 
him to turn aside from professions that he was little 
suited for, and with something less than a hundred a 
year face the future. In time, doubtless, other helps 
were added, and long before the end he had obtained a 
competence. But this is only another instance of the 
maxim, " Providence helps those who help themselves." 
That life at Town-End had encountered and overcome 
the difficulty before the help came. Again, the same 
moral fortitude appears in the firmness with which he 
kept his purpose, and the industry with which he 
wrought it out. Undiscouraged by neglect, undeterred 
by obloquy and ridicule, in the face of obstacles that 
would have daunted almost any other man, he held on 
his way unmoved, and wrought out the gift that was in 
him till the work was complete. Few poets have ever 



84 WORDSWORTH: 

so fully expressed the thing that was given them to 
utter. And the result has been that he has bequeathed 
to the world a body of high thought and noble feel- 
ing which will continue to make all who apprehend it 
think more deeply and feel more wisely to the end of 
time. 

The question has often been asked how far Words- 
worth was a religious poet ; that he was a religious 
man no one doubts. In his earlier poems especially, 
as in " Tintern Abbey," and others, men have pointed 
to passages, and said, These are in their tendency Pan- 
theistic. The supposition that Wordsworth ever main 
(mined a Pantheistic philosophy, ever held a deliberate 
theory of the Divine Being as impersonal, is contra 
dieted both by many an express declaration of his owe. 
and by what is known of his life. 

But it is none the less true that, though he never 
held the Pantheistic doctrine, the presence of nature, 
when he was in the heydey of imagination, stirred in 
him what is called the Pantheistic feeling in its highest 
and purest form. The subject is a deep one, and to do 
it justice would require not a few sentences, but a vol- 
ume. The truth seems to be that the outward world, 
which to commonplace minds is no more than a piece 
of dead mechanism, is in reality full of a vast all- 
pervading life, which is very mysterious. Not to be 
grasped by the formulas of science, this life is appre- 
hended mainly by the imagination, and by those men 
most deeply in whom imagination is most ample and 
profound. Possessing this faculty, larger in measure, 
and more genuine in quality, than any man since 
Shakespeare, Wordsworth felt with proportionate in- 
tensity the life which fills all nature. In her presence 
he felt in some measure, as only the first fathers of the 
Aryan race in the world's infancy felt, the — 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 85 

41 Something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a feeling that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.' ' 

Comparative mythology is only now deciphering 
traces of the primeval intuitions of a something Divine 
in nature, traces winch lie far down in the lowest lay- 
ers of the world's early religions. And those who study 
those things have found in no other modern poet so 
many thoughts yielding glimpses into that morning feel- 
ing for nature which seems to have vanished with the 
world's childhood. As life went on with Wordsworth, 
the visionary gleam grew dimmer, and the moral faith 
grew stronger, so that his later poems contain less of 
that mystical feeling about nature which is the peculiar 
charm of the earlier ones, but more recognition of those 
truths by which conscience lives, and which Christian- 
ity reveals. That he has not clearly bridged over the 
chasm, has not fully harmonized the earlier with the 
later feeling, must be admitted. But for this defect, 
this limitation of insight, who is he that has a right to 
blame him? — only that man who having felt as 
broadly and profoundly the infinite life I allude to, has 
reconciled it with higher religious truth, and taught 
men so to do. But where is such reconciliation to be 
found ? only here and there in some verses of the 
Psalms, or in the Prophecies of Isaiah ; or still more 
in brief passages of the Gospels do these two sides of 
truth seem to meet in harmony. 

In Wordsworth's treatment of human nature the 
same question meets us in another form. In " The 
Prelude," and other poems of the first epoch, it cannot 
be denied that the self-restorative power of the soul 



86 WORDSWORTH: 

seems to be asserted, and the sufficingness of nature to 
console the wounded spirit is implied in a way which 
Wordsworth, if distinctly questioned, would, perhaps at 
any time, certainly in his later years, have disavowed. 
That he was himself conscious of this defect may be 
gathered from the change he made in the reflections 
with which the story of Margaret, in " The Excursion," 
closes. This story was written among the last years 
of last century, at Racedown or Alfoxden. Through 
all the early editions of his poems it stood thus : — 

" The old man, noting this, resumed, and said, 
1 My friend ! enough to sorrow you have given, 
The purposes of wisdom ask no more ; 
Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read 
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.' " 

In the one-volume edition of his works, which ap- 
peared in 1845, we for the first time read the following 
addition, inserted after the third line of the above : — 

" Nor more would she have craved as due to One 
Who, in her worst distress, had ofttimes felt 
The unbounded might of prayer; and learned with soul 
Fixed on the Cross, that consolation springs, 
From sources deeper far than deepest pain, 
For the meek Sufferer. Why then should we read 
The forms of things with an unworthy eye? " 

A little further on, the " Wanderer " proceeds to say 
that once as he passed that way the ruined cottage 
conveyed to his heart — 

u So still an image of tranquillity, 
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful 
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, 
That what we feel of sorrow and despair 
From ruin and from change, and all the grief 
The passing shows of Being leave behind, 
Appeared an idle dream that could not live 
Where meditation was/' 

Instead of the last line and a half, the later editions 
have the folio win £ : — 



TEE MAN AND THE POET. 87 

" Appeared an idle dream that could maintain 
Nowhere dominion o'er the enlightened spirit, 
Whose meditative sympathies repose 
Upon the breast of faith." 

To say that as years increased Wordsworth's faith 

in the vital Christian truth grew more confirmed 

and deep, and that in himself were fulfilled his own 

words — 

u Peace settles where the intellect is meek, 
The faith Heaven strengthens where He moulds the creed,' 1 

is only to say that he was growingly a good man. 
This growth many a line of his later poems, besides 
incidental notices in his letters, and other memoranda 
of his nephew's biography, clearly attests. No doubt 
the wish will at times arise that the unequaled power 
of spiritualizing nature, and of originating tender and 
solemn views of human life, had, for the sake of other 
men, been oftener and more unreservedly turned on 
the great truths of Christian faith. When such a re- 
gret does arise, it is but fair that it should be tempered 
by remembering, as he himself urges, that " his works, 
as well as those of other poets, should not be considered 
as developing all the influences which his own heart rec- 
ognized, but rather those which he felt able as an artist 
to display to advantage." At another time he assured 
a correspondent that he had been averse to frequent 
mention of the mysteries of Christian faith, not because 
he did not duly feel them, but because he felt them too 
deeply to venture on a free handling of them. Above 
all, if he has not, any more than the greatest of former 
poets, done all that our hearts desire, let us be thank- 
ful for the work he has done. 

What that work is, the great religious poet of the 
time, himself a disciple of the elder bard, hinted, in 
the words with which he dedicated to Wordsworth his 



88 WORDSWORTH: 

Oxford lectures on poetry : " Ut aniinos ad sanctiora 
erigeret ; " " to raise our minds to holier things." 

Perhaps I cannot better sum up the whole matter 
than by adopting, if I may, the words of a correspond- 
ent. He observes, 1st, That while Wordsworth spirit- 
ualizes the outward world more than any other poet 
has done, his feeling for it is essentially manly. Na- 
ture, he always insists, gives gladness to the glad, com- 
fort and support to the sorrowful. 2d, There is the 
wondrous depth of his feeling for the domestic affec- 
tions, and more especially for the constancy of them. 
3d, He must be considered a leader in that greatest 
movement of modern times — care for our humbler 
brethren ; his part being, not to help them in their suf- 
ferings, but to make us reverence them for what they 
are, what they have in common with us, or in greater 
measure than ourselves. These are the tendencies 
breathed from every line he wrote. He took the com- 
monest sights of earth, and the homeliest household 
affections, and made you feel that these, which men 
commonly take to be the lowest things, are indeed the 
highest. 

If he seldom ventures within the inner sanctuary, he 
everywhere leads to its outer court, lifting our thoughts 
into a region " neighboring to heaven, and that no for- 
eign land." If he was not universal in the sense in 
which Shakespeare was, and Goethe aimed to be, it 
was because he was smitten with too deep an enthusi- 
asm for those truths by which he was possessed. His 
eye was too intense, too prophetic to admit of his look- 
ing at life dramatically. In fact, no poet of modern 
times has had in him so much of the prophet. In the 
world of nature, to be a revealer of things hidden, the 
sanctifier of things common, the interpreter of new and 
unsuspected relations, the opener of another sense in 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 89 

men ; in the moral world, to be the teacher of truths 
hitherto neglected or unobserved, the awakener of 
men's hearts to the solemnities that encompass them, 
deepening our reverence for the essential soul, apart 
from accident and circumstance, making us feel more 
truly, more tenderly, more profoundly, lifting the 
thoughts upward through the shows of time to that 
which is permanent and eternal, and bringing down on 
the transitory things of eye and ear some shadow of 
the eternal, till we — 

" Feel through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness " — 

this is the office which he will not cease to fulfill, as 
long as the English language lasts. What earth's far- 
off lonely mountains do for the plains and the cities, 
that Wordsworth has done and will do for literature, 
and through literature for society ; sending down great 
rivers of higher truth, fresh purifying winds of feeling, 
to those who least dream from what quarter they come. 
The more thoughtful of each generation will draw 
nearer and observe him more closely, will ascend his 
imaginative heights, and sit under the shadow of his 
profound meditations, and, in proportion as they do so, 
will become more noble and pure in heart. 



COLERIDGE. 



More than enough has perhaps been said in dispar- 
agement of the eighteenth century. It is not there- 
fore to speak more evil of that much abused time, but 
merely to note an obvious fact, if I say that its main 
tendency was towards the outward and the finite. Just 
freed from the last ties of feudalism, escaped too from 
long religious conflicts which had resulted in war and 
revolution, the feelings of the British people took a 
new direction ; the nation's energies were wholly 
turned to the pacific working out of its material and 
industrial resources. Let us leave those deep, inter- 
minable questions, which, as experience has shown, 
lead only to confusion, and let us stick to plain, obvious 
facts, which cannot mislead, and which yield such com- 
fortable results. This was the genius and temper of 
the generation that followed the Revolution of 1688. 
Nor was there wanting a man to give definite shape 
and expression to this tendency of the national mind. 
Locke, a shrewd and practical man, who knew the 
world, furnished his countrymen with a way of think- 
ing singularly in keeping with their then temper ; a 
philosophy which, discarding abstruse ideas, fashioned 
thought mainly out of the senses ; an ethical system 
founded on the selfish instincts of pleasure and pain ; 
and a political theory which, instead of the theocratic 
dreams of the Puritans or the divine right of High- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 91 

Churchmen, or the historic traditions of feudalism, 
grounded government on the more prosaic but not less 
unreal phantasy of an original contract. This whole 
philosophy, however inconsistent with what is noblest 
in British history, was so congenial a growth of the 
British soil, that no other has ever struck so deep a root, 
or spread so wide, and with such endearing influence. 
This way of thinking, introduced by Locke for the 
purpose of moderating the pretensions of human 
thought, came to be believed in by his followers as its 
highest achievement. The half century after Locke 
was no doubt full of mental activity in certain direc- 
tions. It saw Physical Science attain its highest tri- 
umph in the Newtonian discoveries ; History studied 
after a certain manner by votaries more numerous 
than ever before ; and the new science of Politi- 
cal Economy created. But while these fields were 
thronged with busy inquirers, and though Natural 
Theology was much argued and discussed, yet from the 
spiritual side of all questions, from the deep things of 
the soul, from men's living relations to the eternal 
world, educated thought seemed to turn instinctively 
away. The guilds of the learned, as by tacit consent, 
either eschewed these subjects altogether, or, if they 
were constrained to enter on them, they had laid down 
for themselves certain conventional limits, beyond 
which they did not venture. On the other side of 
these lay mystery, enthusiasm, fanaticism — spectres 
abhorred of the wise and prudent. It is a striking 
proof of how entirely the mechanical philosophy had 
saturated the age, that Wesley, the leader of the great 
spiritual counter-movement of last century, the preacher 
of divine realities to a generation fast bound in sense, 
yet in the opening of his sermon on Faith indorses 
the sensational theory, and declares that to man in his 



92 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

natural condition sense is the only inlet of knowl- 
edge. 

The same spirit which pervaded the philosophy and 
theology of that era is apparent not less in its poetry 
and literature. Limitation of range, with a certain 
perfectness of form, contentment with the surface view 
of things, absence of high imagination, repression of 
the deeper feelings, man looked at mainly on his con- 
ventional side, careful descriptions of manners, but no 
open vision, — these are the prevailing characteristics. 
Doubtless the higher truth was not even then left 
without some witnesses. Butler and Berkeley in spec- 
ulation, Burns and Cowper in poetry, Burke in polit- 
ical philosophy, — these were either the criers in the 
wilderness against the idols of their times, or the 
prophets of the new truth that was being born. Men's 
thoughts cannot deal earnestly with many things at 
once ; and each age has its own work assigned it ; 
and the work of the eighteenth century was mainly 
one of utilitarian understanding, of criticising and ques- 
tioning things hitherto believed, of active but narrow 
intelligence divorced from imagination, from deep feel- 
ing, from reverence, from spiritual insight. And when 
this one-sided work was done, the result was isolation, 
individualism, self-will ; the universal in thought lost 
sight of, the universal in ethics denied ; everywhere, 
in speculation as in practice, the private will dominant, 
the Universal Will forgotten. To exult over the igno- 
rant past, to glory in the wonderful present, to have 
got rid of all prejudices, to have no strong beliefs ex- 
cept in material progress, to be tolerant of all tenden- 
cies but fanaticism, this was its highest boast. And 
though this self-complacent wisdom received some rude 
shocks in the crash of revolution with which the last 
century closed, and though the soul and spirit that are 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 93 

in man, long unheeded, then once more awoke and 
made themselves heard, that one-sided and soulless 
intelligence, if weakened, was not destroyed. It was 
carried over into this century in the brisk .but barren 
criticism of the early " Edinburgh Review." And at 
this very moment there are symptoms enough on every 
side that the same spirit, after having received a tem- 
porary repulse, has once more regained the ascendant. 

The same manner of thought which we have at- 
tempted to describe as it existed in our own country, 
dominated in others during the same period. So well 
is it known in Germany that they have a name for it, 
which we want. They call it by a term which means 
the Illumination or Enlightenment, and they have 
marked the notes by which it is known. Some who 
are deep in German lore tell us that Europe has pro- 
duced but one power really counteractive of this Illu- 
mination, or tyranny of the mere understanding, and 
that is, the philosophy which began with Kant and 
culminated in Hegel. And they affect no small scorn 
for any attempt at reaction which has originated else- 
where. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, there 
did arise men nearer home, who felt the defect in the 
thought of the preceding age, and did much to supply 
it ; who strove to base philosophy t on principles of 
universal reason; and who, into thought and senti- 
ment, dwarfed and starved by the effects of Enlighten- 
ment, poured the inspiration of soul and spirit. The 
men who mainly did this in England were Wordsworth 
and Coleridge. These are the native champions of 
spiritual truth against the mechanical philosophy of 
the Illumination. Of the former of the two, I have 
already spoken. In something of the same way I 
propose to place now before my readers some account 
of the friend of Wordsworth, whom his name naturally 



94 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

recalls, a man not less original nor remarkable — Sam- 
uel Taylor Coleridge. And yet, though the two were 
friends, and shared together many mental sympathies, 
between the lives and characters of the philosophic 
poet and the poetic philosopher there was more of 
contrast than of likeness. The one, robust and whole 
in body as in mind, resolute in will, and single in pur- 
pose, knowing little of books and of other men's 
thoughts, and caring less for them, set himself, with 
his own unaided resources, to work out the great orig- 
inal vein of poetry that was within him, and stopped 
not, nor turned aside, till he had fulfilled his task, had 
enriched English literature with a new poetry of the 
deepest and purest ore, and thereby made the world 
forever his debtor. The other, — master of an ampler 
and more varied though not richer field, of quicker 
sympathies, less self-sustained, but touching life and 
thought at more numerous points, eager to know all 
that other men had thought and known, and working 
as well on a basis of wide erudition as on his own 
internal resources, but with a body that did him griev- 
ous wrong, that, far from obeying, frustrated his better 
aspirations, and a will faltering, and irresolute to fol- 
low out the behests of his surpassing intellect, — only 
drove in a shaft here and there into the vast mine of 
thought that was in him, and died leaving samples 
rather of what he might have done, than any full and 
rounded achievement, — yet samples so rich, so varied, 
so suggestive, that to thousands they have been the 
quicken ers of new intellectual life, and to this day they 
stand unequaled by anything his country has since 
produced. In one point, however, the friends are 
alike. They both turned aside from professional aims, 
devoted themselves to pure thought, set themselves to 
counterwork the mechanical and utilitarian bias of 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 95 

their time, and became the great spiritualizers of the 
thought of their countrymen, the fountain-heads from 
which has flowed most of what is high and unworldly 
and elevating in the thinking and speculation of the 
succeeding age. 

It is indeed strange, that of Coleridge's philosophy, 
once so much talked of, and really so important in its 
influence, no comprehensive account has been ever 
attempted. The only attempt in this direction that I 
know of, is that made six years after Coleridge's death, 
and now more than twenty years ago, by one who has 
since become the chief expounder of that philosophy 
which Coleridge spent most of his life in combating. 
In a well-known essay, Mr. Mill, while fully acknowl- 
edging that no other Englishman, save only his own 
teacher Bentham, had left so deep an impress on his 
age, yet turns aside from making a full survey of 
Coleridge's whole range of thought, precluded, as he 
confesses, by his own radical opposition to Coleridge's 
fundamental principles. After setting forth clearly the 
antagonistic schools of thought which, since the dawn 
of philosophy, have divided opinion as to the origin of 
knowledge, and after declaring his own firm adhesion 
to the sensational school, and his consequent inability 
to sympathize with Coleridge's metaphysical views, 
he passes from this part of the subject, and devotes 
the rest of his essay mainly to the consideration of 
Coleridge as a political philosopher. This, however, 
is but one, and that by no means the chief department 
of thought, to which Coleridge devoted himself. Had 
Mr. Mill felt disposed to give to the other and more 
important of Coleridge's speculations, — his views on 
metaphysics, on morals, and on religion, — as well as 
to his criticisms and his poetry, the same masterly 
treatment which he has given to his politics, any 



06 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

further attempt in that direction might have been 
spared. But it is characteristic of Mr. Mill, that, 
though gifted with a power which no other writer of 
his school possesses, of entering into lines of thought, 
and of apparently sympathizing with modes of feeling 
most alien to his own, he still, after the widest sweep 
of appreciation, returns at last to the ground from 
which he started, and there entrenches himself within 
his original tenets as firmly as if he had never caught a 
glimpse of those other and higher truths, with which 
his own principles are inconsistent. 

Before entering on the intellectual result of Cole- 
ridge's labors, and inquiring what new elements he has 
added to British thought, it may be well to pause for a 
moment, and review briefly the well-known circum- 
stances of his life. This will not only add a human 
interest to the more abstract thoughts which follow, 
but may perhaps help to make them better understood. 
And if, in contrast with the life of Wordsworth, and 
with its own splendid promise, the life of Coleridge is 
disappointing even to sadness, it has not the less for 
that a mournful interest ; while the union of transcend- 
ent genius with infirmity of will and irregular impulses, 
the failure and the penitential regret, lend to his story 
a humanizing, even a tragic pathos, which touches our 
common nature more closely than any gifts of genius. 

The vicarage of Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire, 
was the birthplace and early home of Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge. As in Wordsworth we saw that his whole 
character was in keeping with his native Cumberland, 
— the robust northern yeoman, only touched with 
genius, — so the character of Coleridge, so far as it 
had any local hue, seems more native to South Eng- 
land. Is it fanciful to imagine that there was some- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 97 

thing in that character which accords well with the 
soft mild air, and the dreamy loveliness that rests on 
the blue coombes and sea-coves of South Devon ? He 
was born on the 21st of October 1772, nearly two 
years and a half after Wordsworth's birth, the youngest 
child of ten by his father's second marriage with Anne 
Bowden, said to have been a woman of strong practical 
sense, thrifty, industrious, very ambitious for her sons, 
but herself without any " tincture of letters." Plainly 
not from her, but wholly from his father, Samuel 
Taylor took his temperament. The Rev. John Cole- 
ridge, sometime head-master of the Free Grammar 
School, afterwards vicar of the parish of Ottery St. 
Mary's, is described as, for his age, a great scholar, 
studious, immersed in books, altogether unknowing and 
regardless of the world and its ways, simple in nature 
and primitive in manners, heedless of passing events, 
and usually known as " the absent man." In a Latin 
grammar which he wrote for his pupils, he changed the 
case which Julius Caesar named, from the ablative to 
the Quale -quare-quidditive, just as his son might have 
done had he ever taken to writing grammars. He 
wrote dissertations on portions of the Old Testament, 
with the same sort of discursiveness which his son 
afterwards showed on a greater scale. In his sermons 
he used to quote the very words of the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures, and the country people would exclaim admir- 
ingly, " How fine he was ! He gave us the very words 
the Spirit spoke in." Of his absent fits and his other 
eccentricities, many stories were long preserved in his 
own neighborhood, which Coleridge used to tell to his 
friends at Highgate, till the tears ran down his face at 
the remembrance. Among other well-known stories, 
it is told that once when he had to go from home for 
several days, his wife packed his portmanteau with a 



98 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

shirt for each day, charging him strictly to be sure and 
use them. On his return, his wife, on opening the 
portmanteau, was surprised to find no shirts in it. On 
asking him to account for this, she found that he had 
duly obeyed her commands, and had put on a shirt 
every day, but never taken off one. There were all 
the shirts, not in the portmanteau, but on his own 
back. "With all these eccentricities, he was a good and 
unworldly Christian pastor, much beloved and respected 
by his own people. Though Coleridge was only seven 
years old when his father was removed by a sudden 
death, he remembered him to the last with deep rev- 
erence and love. " O that I might so pass away, if, 
like him, I were an Israelite without guile ! The 
image of my father — my revered, kind, learned, simple- 
hearted father — is a religion to me." 

During his childhood, he tells us, he never took part 
in the plays and games of his brothers, but sought 
refuge by his mother's side, to read his little books and 
listen to the talk of his elders. If he played at all, it 
was at cutting down nettles with a stick, fancying them 
the seven champions of Christendom. He had, he says, 
the simplicity and docility of a child, but he never 
thought or spoke as a child. 

But childhood with him, such as it was, did not last 
long. At the age of nine he was removed to a school 
in the heart of London, Christ's Hospital, " an institu- 
tion," says Charles Lamb, " to keep those who yet hold 
up their heads in the world from sinking." The pres- 
entation to this charity school, no doubt a great thing 
for the youngest of so many sons, was obtained through 
the influence of Judge Buller, formerly one of his 
father's pupils. " O what a change," writes Coleridge 
in after years, " from home to this city school ; de- 
pressed, moping, friendless, a poor orphan, half- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 99 

starved ! " Of this school, Charles Lamb, the school 
companion, and through life the firm friend of Coleridge, 
has left two descriptions in his delightful Essays. 
Everything in the world has, they say, two sides ; cer- 
tainly Christ's Hospital must have had. One cannot 
imagine any two things more unlike than the picture 
which Lamb draws of the school in his first essay, and 
that in the second. The first sets forth the look which 
the school wore to Lamb himself, a London boy, with 
his family close at hand, ready to welcome him at all 
hours, to send him daily supplies of additional food, and 
with influential friends among the trustees, who, if he 
had wrongs, would see them righted. The second 
shows the stepdame side it turned on Coleridge, an 
orphan from the country, with no friends at hand, for- 
lorn, half starved, "for in those days the food of the 
Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no 
friends to supply them." Any one who cares to see 
these things sketched off as no other could sketch them, 
may turn to Lamb's essay, " Christ's Hospital Five-and- 
Thirty Years Ago." " To this late hour of my life," he 
represents Coleridge as saying, " I trace impressions 
left by the recollection of those friendless holidays. 
The long warm days of summer never return, but they 
bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of 
those whole-day leaves, when, by some strange arrange- 
ment, we were turned out for the livelong day upon 
our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or 
none. I remember those bathing excursions to the 
New River. How merrily we would sally forth into 
the fields, and strip under the first warmth of the sun, 
and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting us 
appetites for noon, which those of us that were penniless 
(our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had 
not the means of allaying ; the very beauty of the day, 

i. of a 



100 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty 
setting a keener edge upon them ! How faint and lan- 
guid, finally, we would return towards nightfall to our 
desired morsel, half rejoicing, half reluctant that the 
hours of our uneasy liberty had expired." In one of 
these bathing excursions Coleridge swam the New 
River in his clothes, and let them dry on his back in 
the fields. This laid the first seeds of those rheumatic 
pains and that prolonged bodily suffering which never 
afterwards left him, and which did so much to frustrate 
the large promise of his youth. 

In the lower school at Christ's the time was spent 
in idleness, and little was learnt. But even then Cole- 
ridge was a devourer of books, and this appetite was 
fed by a strange accident, which, though often told, 
must here be repeated once again. One day as the 
lower schoolboy walked down the Strand, going with 
his arms as if in the act of swimming, he touched the 
pocket of a passer-by. " What, so young and so 
wicked ! " exclaimed the stranger, at the same time 
seizing the boy for a pickpocket. " I am not a pick- 
pocket ; I only thought I was Leander swimming the 
Hellespont." The capturer, who must have been a 
man of some feeling, was so struck with the answer, 
and with the intelligence as well as simplicity of the 
boy, that instead of handing him over to the police, he 
subscribed to a library, that Coleridge might get thence 
in future his fill of books. In a short time he read 
right through the catalogue and exhausted the library. 
While Coleridge was thus idling his time in the lower 
school, Middleton, an elder boy, afterwards writer on 
the Greek article, and Bishop of Calcutta, found him 
one day sitting in a corner and reading Virgil by him- 
self, not as a lesson, but for pleasure. Middleton re- 
ported this to Dr. Bowyer, then head-master of the 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 101 

school, who, on questioning the master of the lower 
school about Coleridge, was told that he was a dull 
scholar, could never repeat a single rule of syntax, but 
was always ready to give one of his own. Henceforth 
Coleridge was under the head-master's eye, and soon 
passed into the upper school to be under his immediate 
care. Dr. Bowyer was one of the stern old discipli- 
narians of those days, who had boundless faith in the 
lash. Coleridge was one of those precocious boys who 
might easily have been converted into a prodigy, had 
that been the fashion at the time. But, " Thank 
Heaven," he said, " I was flogged instead of flattered." 
He was so ordinary looking a boy, with his great black 
head, that Bowyer, when he had flogged him well, 
generally bestowed on him an extra cut, " For you are 
such an ugly fellow." When he was fifteen, Coleridge, 
in order to get rid of school, wished to be apprenticed 
to a shoemaker and his wife, who had been kind to 
him. On the day when some of the boys were to be 
apprenticed to trades, Crispin appeared and sued for 
Coleridge. The head-master, on hearing the proposal, 
and Coleridge's assent, hurled the tradesman from the 
room with such violence, that had this last been litig- 
iously inclined, he might have sued the doctor for as- 
sault. And so Coleridge used to joke, " I lost the 
opportunity of making safeguards for the understand- 
ings of those who will never thank me for what I am 
trying to do in exercising their reason." 

While Coleridge was at school, one of his brothers 
was attending the London Hospital, and from his fre- 
quent visits there the Blue-coat boy imbibed a love of 
surgery and doctoring, and was for a time set on mak- 
ing this his profession. He devoured English, Latin, 
and Greek books on medicine voraciously, and had by 
heart a whole Latin medical dictionary. But this 



102 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

dream gave way, or led on to a rage for metaphysics, 
which metaphysical reading finally landed him in Vol- 
taire's " Philosophical Dictionary," after perusing which 
he sported infidel. When this new turn reached 
Bowyer's ears, he sent for Coleridge. " So, sirrah ! 
you are an infidel, are you ? Then I'll flog your infi- 
delity out of you." So saying, the doctor administered 
the severest, and, as Coleridge used to say, the only 
just flogging he ever received. 

Of this stern scholastic Lamb has left the following 
portrait : — 

" lie had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different 
omen. The one serene, smiling, powdered, betokening 
a mild day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, 
angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. 
Woe to the school when he made his morning appear- 
ance in his * Passy,' or passionate wig. Nothing was 
more common than to see him make a headlong entry 
into the school-room from his inner recess or library, 
and with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 
1 'Ods my life, sirrah ! ' his favorite adjuration, ' I have 
a great mind to whip you,' then with as sudden a re- 
tracting an impulse fling back into his lair, and then, 
after a cooling relapse of some minutes (during which 
all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context), 
drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect 
sense, as if it had been some devil's litany, with the 
expletory yell, ' and I will, too.' In his gentler moods 
he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for 
what I have heard, to himself, of whipping a boy and 
reading the * Debates ' at the same time — a paragraph 

and a lash between Perhaps," adds Lamb, 

" we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious 
ejaculation of Coleridge " (the joke was no doubt 
Lamb's own) " when he heard that his old master was 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 103 

on his death-bed, ' Poor J. B., may all his faults be for- 
given, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub 
boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach 
his sublunary infirmities.' " 

How much of all this may be Lamb's love of fun one 
cannot say. Coleridge always spoke of Dr. Bowyer 
with grateful affection. In his literary life he speaks 
of having enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very 
sensible, though severe master ; one who taught him to 
prefer Demosthenes to Cicero, Homer and Theocritus 
to Virgil, and Virgil to Ovid ; who accustomed his 
pupils to compare Lucretius, Terence, and the purer 
poems of Catullus, not only with " the Roman poets of 
the silver, but even with those of the Augustan era, 
and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to 
see the superiority of the former in the truth and na- 
tiveness both of their thoughts and diction." This 
doctrine was wholesome though rare in those days, not 
so common even now, so much so that some have sup- 
posed that in these and other lessons with which Cole- 
ridge credited Dr. Bowyer, he was but reflecting back 
on his master his own afterthoughts. 

While Coleridge was being thus wholesomely drilled 
in the great ancient models, his own poetic power 
began to put forth some buds. Up to the age of fifteen, 
his school verses were not beyond the mark of a clever 
schoolboy. At sixteen, however, the genius cropped 
out. The first ray of it appears in a short allegory, 
written at the latter age, and entitled " Real and Im- 
aginary Time." The opening lines are — 

" On the wide level of a mountain's head, 
1 knew not where; but 'twas some faery place." 

In that short piece, short and slight as it is, there is a 
real touch of his after spirit and melody. 



104 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

During those years when he was in the upper school, 
metaphysics and controversial theology struggled for 
some time with poetry for the mastery ; but at last, 
under the combined influence of a first love and of 
Bowles's poems, he was led clear of the bewildering 
maze, and poetry for some years was paramount. It 
may seem strange now that Bowles's sonnets and early 
poems, which Coleridge then met with for the first 
time, should have produced on him so keen an impres- 
sion of novelty. But so it often happens that what 
was, on its first appearance, quite original, when we 
look back upon it in later years, after it has been ab- 
sorbed into the general taste, seems to lose nearly all 
its freshness. There can be no doubt of the powerful 
effect that Bowles had on Coleridge's dawning powers ; 
that he opened the young poet's eyes to what was false 
and meretricious in the artificial school from Pope to 
Darwin, and made him feel that here, for the first time 
in contemporary poetry, natural thought was combined 
with natural diction — heart reconciled with head. To 
those who care for these things, it would be worth 
while to turn to the first chapter of Coleridge's " Liter- 
ary Life," and see there the first fermenting of his 
poetic taste and principles. But during those last 
school years, while his mind was thus expanding, and 
while his existence was a more tolerable, in some re- 
spects even a happy one, he was suffering severely in 
that body, which throughout life was such a clog to 
him. Full half his time from seventeen to eighteen 
was passed in the sick-ward, afflicted with jaundice and 
rheumatic fever, inherent it may be in his constitution, 
but doubtless not lessened by those swimmings over the 
New River in his clothes. But, above these sufferings, 
which were afterwards so heavily to weigh him down, 
Coleridge, during his early years, was enabled by buoy- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 105 

ancy of heart to rise, and to hide them from ordinary 
observers. Having dwelt thus long on Coleridge's 
school-days, because they are very fully recorded, and 
contain as in miniature both the strength and the weak- 
ness of the full-grown man, I may close them with 
Lamb's description of Coleridge as he appeared in the 
retrospect of Lamb's school companions : — 

" Come back to my memory like as thou wert in the 
dayspring of my fancies, with hope like a fiery column 
before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned — Sam- 
uel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! 
How have I seen the casual passer through the clois- 
ters stand still, entranced with admiration ('while he 
weighed the disproportion between the speech and the 
garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in 
thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iam- 
blichus or Plotinus ; for even then thou waxedst not 
pale at such philosophic draughts ; or reciting Homer 
in his Greek, or Pindar ; while the walls of the old 
Grey Friars reechoed the accents of the inspired 
charity boy ! " 

It is hardly possible to conceive two school-times 
more unlike than this of Coleridge at Christ's, pent up 
in the heart of London city, and that of Wordsworth 
at Hawkshead, free of Esthwaite Mere, and all the 
surrounding solitudes. And yet each, as well in habits 
and teaching as in outward scenery and circumstance, 
answers strangely to the character and after lives of 
the two friends. 

Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in Feb- 
ruary 1791, just a month after Wordsworth had quitted 
the University. On neither of the poets had their 
University much effect. For neither was that the 
place and the hour. Coleridge for a time, under the 
influence of his elder friend Middleton, was industrious, 



106 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

read hard, and obtained the prize for the Greek Sap- 
phic ode. It was on some subject about slavery, and 
was better in thought than in Greek. Afterwards he 
tried for the Craven Scholarship, in which contest his 
rivals were Keat, afterwards head-master of Eton, 
Bethell, who became an M. P. for Yorkshire, and But- 
ler, the future head of Shrewsbury School and Bishop 
of Lichfield. The last-named won the scholarship. 
Out of sixteen or seventeen competitors, Coleridge was 
selected along with the above three ; but he was not 
the style of man to come out great in University com- 
petitions. He had not that exactness and readiness 
which are needed for those trials ; and he wanted en- 
tirely the competitive ardor which is with many so 
powerful an incentive. After this there is no more 
notice of regular work. His heart was elsewhere — 
in poetry, with Bowles for guide ; in philosophy, with 
Hartley, who had belonged to his own college ; plung- 
ing into politics too, which then filled all ardent young 
minds even to intoxication. For the French Revolu- 
tion was then in its first frenzy, promising liberty, vir- 
tue, regeneration to the old and outworn world. Into 
that vortex of boundless hope and wild delirium what 
high-minded youth could keep from plunging? Not 
Coleridge. u In the general conflagration," he writes, 
" my feelings and imagination did not remain unkin- 
dled. I should have been ashamed rather than proud 
of myself if they had." Pamphlets were pouring 
from the press on the great subjects then filling all 
men's minds ; and whenever one appeared from the 
pen of Burke or other man of power, Coleridge, who 
had read it in the morning, repeated it* every word to 
his friends gathered round their small supper-tables. 
Presently one Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, being 
accused of sedition, of defamation of the Church of 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 107 

England, and of holding Unitarian doctrines, was tried 
by the authorities, condemned, and banished the Uni- 
versity. Coleridge sided zealously with Frend, not 
only from the sympathy which generous youth always 
feels for the persecuted, but also because he had him- 
self adopted those Unitarian and other principles for 
which Frend suffered. Hence arose a growing disaf- 
fection, which must have weakened his attachment to 
his University. Other circumstances supervened, which 
in his second year of residence, brought his Cambridge 
career to a sudden close. 

The loss of Middleton, his trusty friend and guide, 
who, failing in the final examination, quitted the Uni- 
versity without obtaining a fellowship ; and the press- 
ure of some college debts, less than £100, incurred 
through his own inexperience, drove Coleridge into 
despondency. He went to London, and wandered 
hopelessly about the streets. At night he sat down on 
the steps of a house in Chancery Lane, where, being 
soon surrounded by swarms of beggars, real or feigned, 
he emptied to them the little money that remained in 
his pockets. In the morning, seeing an advertisement 
— " Wanted, Recruits for the loth Light Dragoons," 
he said to himself, " Well, I have hated all my life sol- 
diers and horses ; the sooner I cure myself of that the 
better." He enlisted as Private Comberbach, a name, 
the truth of which he himself was wont to say, his 
horse must have fully appreciated. A rare sight it 
must have been to see Coleridge perched on some hard- 
set, rough-trotting trooper, and undergoing his first les- 
sons in the riding-school, with the riding master shout- 
ing out to the rest of the awkward squad, " Take care 
of that Comberbach ; he'll ride over you." For the 
grooming of his horse and other mechanical duties 
Coleridge was dependent on the kindness of his com- 



108 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

rades, with whom he was a great favorite. Their ser- 
vices he repaid by writing all their letters to their wives 
and sweethearts. At last the following sentence, written 
up in the stable under his saddle, " Eheu, quam infortu- 
nii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," revealed his real 
condition to a captain who had Latin enough to trans- 
late the words, and heart enough to feel them. About 
the same time an old Cambridge acquaintance passing 
through Reading on his way to join his regiment, met 
Coleridge in the street in dragoon uniform, stopped him 
when he would have passed, and informed his friends. 
After about four months' service he was bought off, 
returned to Cambridge, stayed there but a short time, 
and finally left in June 1794, without taking a degree. 
Then followed what may be called his Bristol period. 
This included his first friendship with Southey, their 
dream of emigration, their marriage, Coleridge's first 
attempts at authorship, and his many ineffectual plans 
for settling what he used to call the Bread and Cheese 
Question. On leaving Cambridge he had gone to 
Oxford, and there met with Southey, still an under- 
graduate at Balliol, whose friendship, quickly formed, 
became one of the main hinges on which Coleridge's 
after life turned. Their tastes and opinions on religion 
and politics were then at one, though their characters 
were widely different. Southey, with far less genius 
than Coleridge, possessed that firmness of will, that 
definite aim and practical wisdom, the want of which 
were the bane of Coleridge's life. Southey's high and 
pure disposition and consistent conduct, combined with 
much mental power and literary acquirement, made 
Coleridge feel, as he had not done before, the duty 
and dignity of bringing actions into accordance with 
principles, both in word and deed. In after years 
Southey was to Coleridge a faithful monitor in word, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 109 

and a friend firm and self-denying in deed. In moral- 
ity of action, it must be owned that he rose as much 
above Coleridge, as in genius he fell below him. But 
at their first meeting, pure and high-minded as Southey 
was, he had not so fixed his views, or so systematically 
ordered his life, as he afterwards did. He too, like 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, had been stirred at heart 
by the moral earthquake of the French Revolution. 
Enthusiastically democratic in politics and Unitarian 
in religion, he .at once responded to the day-dream of 
Pantisocracy, which Coleridge opened to him at Ox- 
ford. This was a plan of founding a community in 
America, where a band of brothers, cultivated and 
pure-minded, were to have all things in common, and 
selfishness was to be unknown. The common land 
was to be tilled by the common toil of the men ; the 
wives, for all were to be married, were to perform all 
household duties ; and abundant leisure was to remain 
over for social intercourse, or to pursue literature, or 
in more pensive moods — 

" Soothed sadly by the dirgeful wind, 
Muse on the sore ills they had left behind.' r 

The banks of the Susquehanna were to be this earthly 
paradise, chosen more for the melody of the name than 
for any ascertained advantages. Indeed, they hardly 
seem to have known exactly where their paradise lay. 
Southey soon left Balliol, and the two friends went 
to Bristol, Southey's native town, there to prepare for 
carrying out the Pantisocratic dream. Such visions 
have been not only dreamed since then, but acted on 
by enthusiastic youths, and the result leaves no reason 
to regret that the project of Coleridge and Southey 
never got further than being a dream. Want of 
money was, as usual, the immediate cause of the fail- 



110 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

ure ; everything else had been provided for, but when 
it came to the point it was found that neither the two 
leaders, nor any of the other friends who had embarked 
in the scheme, had money enough to pay their passage 
to America. Southey was the first to see how matters 
stood, and to recant. At this Coleridge was greatly 
disgusted, and gave vent to his disappointment in no 
measured language. The scheme was abandoned early 
in 1795, and the two young poets, having been for 
some time in love with two sisters of a Bristol family, 
were married, Coleridge in October of that year to 
Sarah Fricker, and Southey six weeks later to her 
sister Edith. 

Marriage, of course, brought the money question 
home to Coleridge more closely than Pantisocracy 
had done. The three or four following years were 
occupied with attempts to solve it. But his ability 
was not of the money making order, nor did his habits, 
natural or acquired, give even such ability as he had 
a fair chance in the toil for bread. First he tried 
lecturing to the Bristol folks on the political topics of 
the time, and on religious questions. But either the 
lectures did not pay, or Coleridge did not stick to 
them steadily, so they were soon given up, and after- 
wards published as " Conciones ad populum," Cole- 
ridge's first prose work. Attacking with equal vehe- 
mence Pitt, the great minister of the day, and his oppo- 
nents, the English Jacobins, Coleridge showed in this 
his earliest, as in his latest works, that he could not 
be warranted to run quietly in the harness of any 
party, and that those who tried to set him to this work 
were sure of an upset. Coleridge's next enterprise 
was the publication of a weekly miscellany ; the con- 
tents were to range over nearly the same subjects as 
those now discussed in the best weeklies, and the aim 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Ill 

was to be, as announced in the motto, that " all may 
know the truth, and that the truth may make us free." 
But powerful as he would have been as a contributor, 
Coleridge was not the man to conduct such an under- 
taking, least of all to do so single-handed. The most 
notable thing about " The Watchman " was the tour 
he made through the Midland county towns with a 
naming prospectus, " Knowledge is power," to try the 
political atmosphere. It was dining this tour that 
Coleridge encountered the Birmingham tallow-chan- 
dler, whom he describes with hair like candlewicks, and 
face pinguinitescent, for it was a melting day with him. 
After Coleridge had harangued the man of dips for 
half an hour, and run through every note in the whole 
gamut of eloquence, now reasoning, now declaiming, 
now indignant, now pathetic, on the state of the world 
as it is, compared with what it should be ; at the first 
pause in the harangue the tallow-chandler interposed : 
" And what might the cost be ? " " Only fourpence 
(O the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four- 
pence !) — only fourpence, sir, each number." " That 
comes to a deal of money at the end of a year ; and 
how much did you say there was to be for the money ? " 
" Thirty -two pages, sir ! large octavo, closely printed." 
" Thirty and two pages ? Bless me ! except what I 
does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than 
I ever reads, sir, all the year round. I am as great 
a one as any man in Brummagem, sir, for liberty and 
truth, and all that sort of things, but as to this (no 
offense, I hope, sir) I must beg to be excused." 

Notwithstanding this repulse, Coleridge returned to 
Bristol triumphant with above a thousand subscribers' 
names, having left on the minds of all who heard his 
wonderful conversation an impression that survived 
long after "The Watchman" was forgotten. The 



112 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 

first number appeared on the 1st of March, the tenth 
and last on the 13th of May, 1796. From various 
causes, delay in publishing beyond the fixed day, of- 
fense given to the religious subscribers by an essay 
against fast-days, to his democratic patrons by inveigh- 
ing against Jacobinism and French philosophy, to the 
Tories by abuse of Pitt, to the Whigs by not more 
heartily backing Fox, the subscription list rapidly 
thinned, and he was glad to close the concern at a dead 
loss of money to himself, not to mention his wasted 
labor. Though this failure was to him a very serious 
matter, he could still laugh heartily at the ludicrous 
side of it. He tells how one morning, when he had 
risen earlier than usual, he found the servant girl light- 
ing the fire with an extravagant quantity of paper. 
On his remonstrating against the waste, " La, sir ! " 
replied poor Nanny, " why, it is only Watchmen." 

The third of the Bristol enterprises was the publica- 
tion of his "Juvenile Poems," in the April of 1796, 
while " The Watchman " was still struggling for exist- 
ence. For the copyright of these he received thirty 
guineas, from Joseph Cottle, a Bristol bookseller, who 
to his own great credit undertook to publish the works 
of Southey, of Coleridge, and of Wordsworth, at a 
time when those higher in the trade would have noth- 
ing to say to them. If Cottle long afterwards, when 
their names had waxed great, published a somewhat 
gossiping book of reminiscences, and gave to the pub- 
lic many petty details which a wiser man would have 
withheld, it should always be remembered, to his honor, 
that he showed true kindness and liberality towards 
these men, especially towards Coleridge, when he greatly 
needed it, and that he had a genuine admiration of 
their genius for its own sake, quite apart from its mar- 
ketable value. No doubt, if any one wishes to see 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 113 

the seamy side of genius, he will find it in the letters 
and anecdotes of Coleridge preserved in Cottle's book. 

Other plans for a livelihood were ventilated during 
his Bristol sojourn, such as writing for the " Morning 
Chronicle " and taking private pupils, but as these 
came to nought, I need only notice one other line in 
which Coleridge at this time occasionally employed 
himself, not without some thought of making it a per- 
manent profession. We have seen that before leaving 
Cambridge he had become a Unitarian, and so he con- 
tinued till about the time of his visit to Germany. 
While he was in Bristol he was engaged from time to 
time to preach in the Unitarian chapels in the neigh- 
borhood. The subjects which he there discussed seem 
to have been somewhat miscellaneous, and the reports 
of his success vary. Nothing can be more dreary, if 
it were not grotesque, than Cottle's description of his 
first appearance as a preacher in a Unitarian chapel 
in Bath. On the appointed Sunday morning, Cole- 
ridge, Cottle, and party drove from Bristol to Bath in a 
post-chaise. Coleridge mounted the pulpit in blue coat 
and white waistcoat, and for the morning service, choos- 
ing a text from Isaiah, treated his audience to a lecture 
against the Corn Laws ; in the afternoon, he gave them 
another on the Hair-Powder Tax. The congregation 
on the latter occasion consisted of seventeen, of whom 
several walked out of the chapel during the service. 
The party returned to Bristol disheartened, Coleridge 
from a sense of failure, the others with a dissatisfying 
sense of a Sunday wasted. Compare this with Haz- 
litt's account of his appearance some time afterwards 
before a Birmingham congregation: — 

" It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning 
before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud to hear 
this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day 



114 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

I have to live, shall I have such another walk as that 
cold, raw, comfortless one. When I got there the 
organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was 
done, Mr. Coleridge arose and gave out his text, " He 
departed again into a mountain himself alone." As 
he gave out this text, his voice rose like a steam of rich 
distilled perfumes ; and when he came to the two last 
words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it 
seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sound 
had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and 
as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence 
through the universe. The preacher then launched 
into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. 
The sermon was upon peace or war, upon Church and 
State — not their alliance, but their separation ; on the 
spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity — not 
as the same, but as opposed to one another. He 
talked of those who had inscribed the Cross of Christ 
on banners dripping with human gore. He made a 
poetical and pastoral excursion, and, to show the fatal 
effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the 
simple shepherd-boy, driving his team a-field, or sitting 
under the hawthorn, piping to his flock as though he 
should never be old ; and the same poor country lad, 
crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at 
an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with 
his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a 
long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of 
the profession of blood. 

" ' Such were the notes our own loved poet sung.' 

" And for myself, I could not have been more de- 
lighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. 
Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and 
Genius had embraced, under the eye and sanction of 
Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. ,, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 115 

Which of the two was right in his estimate of 
Coleridge's preaching, Cottle or Hazlitt ? Or were 
both right, and is the difference to be accounted for by 
Coleridge, like most men of genius, having his days 
now above himself, now below? With one more pas- 
sage from Hazlitt, descriptive of Coleridge's talk at 
that time, I may close his Bristol life : — 

" He is the only person I ever knew who answered 
to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person 
from whom I ever learned anything. There is only 
one thing he might have learned from me in return, 
but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever 
knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, 
and fed on manna. He talkeoT on forever; and you 
wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts did not 
seem to come with labor and effort; but as if borne on 
the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of imagination 
lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear 
like a pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music 
of thought. His mind was clothed with wings ; and 
raised on them he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his 
descriptions, you then saw the progress of human 
happiness and liberty in bright and never ending suc- 
cession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy 
shapes ascending and descending. And shall I who 
heard him then, listen to him now? Not I ! That 
spell is broke ; that time is gone forever ; that voice is 
heard no more: but still the recollection comes rush- 
ing by, with thoughts of long past years, and rings in 
my ears with never-dying sound." 

It is pitiful to turn from such high-flown descrip- 
tions to the glimpses of poverty and painful domestic 
cares with which his letters of this date abound. Over 
these one would gladly draw the veil. Whoso wishes 
to linger on them may turn him to Cottle. There are 



116 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

many more incidents of this time which I can but 
name : his residence for some months in a rose-covered 
cottage in the neighboring village of Clevedon ; the 
birth of his first son, whom he named Hartley, for love 
of that philosopher whom Coleridge then admired as 
the wisest of men ; his complete reconciliation with 
Southey on the return of the latter from Portugal. 
One little entry, in a letter of November 1796, is sadly 
memorable as the first appearance of 

" The little rift within the lute, 
Which soon will make the music mute." 

He complains of a violent neuralgic pain in the face, 
which for the time was like to overpower him. " But," 
he writes, " I took between sixty and seventy drops 
of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus." That sop 
was soon to become the worst Cerberus of the two. 

It was early in 1797 that Coleridge removed with 
his family ' from Bristol, and pitched his tent in the 
village of Nether Stowey, under the green hills of 
Quantock. One of the kindest and most hospitable 
of his friends, Mr. Poole, had a place hard by ; and 
Coleridge having in June made a visit to Wordsworth 
at Racedown, persuaded this young poet, and his 
scarcely less original sister, to adjourn thence to the 
neighboring mansion of Alfoxden. With such friends 
for daily intercourse, with the most delightful country 
for walks on every side, and with apparently fewer em- 
barrassments, Coleridge here enjoyed the most genial 
and happy years that were ever vouchsafed to his 
changeful existence. " Wherever we turn we have 
woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks 
running down them, through green meadows to the 
sea. The hills that cradle these valleys are either 
covered with ferns and bilberries or oak woods. Walks 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 117 

extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of 
which is their wild simplicity; they are perfectly 
smooth, without rocks." Over these green hills of 
Quantock the two young poets wandered for hours 
together, rapt in fervid talk ; Coleridge no doubt the 
chief speaker, Wordsworth more silent, hot less sug- 
gestive. Never before or since have these downs 
heard such high converse. " His society I found an 
invaluable blessing, and to him I looked up with equal 
reverence as a poet, a philosopher, and a man." So 
wrote Coleridge in after years. By this time Words- 
worth had given himself wholly to poetry as his work 
for life. Alfoxden saw the birth of many of the 
happiest, most characteristic of his shorter poems. 
Coleridge had some years before this, when he first 
fell in with Wordsworth's "Descriptive Sketches," 
found even in these the opening of a new vein. He 
himself, too, had from time to time turned aside from 
more perplexing studies, and found poetry to be its 
own exceeding great reward. But in this Nether 
Stowey time Coleridge came all at once to his poetic 
manhood. Whether it was the freedom from the 
material ills of life which he found in the aid and 
kindly shelter of Mr. Poole, or the secluded beauty of 
the Quantock, or the converse with Wordsworth, or all 
combined, there cannot be any doubt that this was, as 
it has been called, his annus mirabilis, his poetic prime. 
This was the year of " Genevieve," " The Dark Ladie," 
" Kubla Khan," " France," the lines to Wordsworth on 
first hearing " The Prelude " read aloud, the " Ancient 
Mariner," and the first part of " Christabel," not to 
mention many other poems of less mark. The occasion 
which called forth the two latter* poems, to form part 
of a joint volume with Wordsworth, has been already 
noticed. If Coleridge could only have maintained the 



118 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

high strain he then struck, with half the persistency of 
his brother poet, posterity might perhaps have had 
more reason to regret that he should ever have turned 
to other subjects. During all his time at Nether 
Stowey he kept up a fire of small letters to Cottle in 
Bristol, at one time about poems or other literary 
projects, at another asking Cottle to find him a servant- 
maid, "simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, 
and scientific in vaccimulgence ! " When they had 
composed poems enough to form one or more joint 
volumes, Cottle is summoned from Bristol to visit 
them. Cottle took Wordsworth in his gig from Bristol 
to Alfoxden, picking up Coleridge at Nether Stowey. 
They had brought the viands for their dinner with 
them in the gig : a loaf, a stout piece of cheese, and a 
bottle of brandy. As they neared their landing place, 
a beggar whom they helped with some pence, returned 
their kindness by helping himself to the cheese from 
the back of the gig. Arrived at the place Coleridge 
unyoked the horse, dashed down the gig-shafts with a 
jerk that rolled the brandy bottle from the seat, and 
broke it to pieces before their eyes. Then Cottle set 
to unharnessing the horse, but could not get off the 
collar. Wordsworth next essayed it, with no better 
success. At last Coleridge came to the charge, and 
worked away with such violence that he nearly thrawed 
the poor horse's head off. He too was forced to desist, 
with a protest that " the horse's head must have grown 
since the collar was put on." While the two poets 
and their publisher were standing thus nonplussed, the 
servant girl happened to pass through the stable yard, 
and seeing their perplexity, exclaimed, " La, master 
you don't go about the work the right way; you 
should do it like this." So saying, she turned the 
collar upside down, and slipped it off in a trice. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 119 

Then came the dinner, "a superb brown loaf, a dish 
of lettuces, and, instead of the brandy, a jug of pure 
water." The bargain was struck, and Cottle under- 
took the publication of the first edition of the famous 
" Lyrical Ballads," which appeared in Midsummer, 
1798. About the same time the two Messrs. Wedge- 
wood settled on Coleridge £150 a year for life, which 
made him think no more of Unitarian chapels, and 
enabled him to undertake, what he had for some time 
desired, a continental tour. In September of that 
year the two poets bade farewell, Wordsworth and his 
sister to Alfoxden, Coleridge to Nether Stowey, and 
together all three set sail for Hamburg. 

So ended the Nether Stowey time, to Coleridge the 
brief blink of a poetic morning which had no noon ; to 
Wordsworth but the hopeful dawn of a day which com- 
pletely fulfilled itself. 

Landed at Hamburg, Wordsworth was interpreter, 
as he had French, Coleridge nothing but English and 
Latin. After an interview with the aged poet Klop- 
stock, the two young poets parted company, Words- 
worth, with his sister, settling at Goslar, there to com- 
pose, by the German fire- stoves, the poems on 
"Matthew," "Nutting," "Ruth," "The Poet's Epi- 
taph," and others, in his happiest vein ; while Coleridge 
made for Ratzeburg, where he lived for four months in 
a pastor's family, to learn the language, and then 
passed on to Gottingen to attend lectures and consort 
with German students and professors. Among the lec- 
tures were those of Blumenbach on Natural History, 
while Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament were 
repeated to him from notes by a student who had him- 
self taken them down. Wordsworth kept sending 
Coleridge the poems he was throwing off during this 
prolific winter, and Coleridge replied in letters full of 



120 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

hope that their future homes might be iu the same 
neighborhood : " Whenever I spring forward into the 
future with noble affections, I always alight by your 
side." His whole time in Germany seems to have 
overflowed with exuberant spirits and manifold life. 
" Instead of troubling others with my own crude no- 
tions, I was better employed in storing my head with 
the notions of others. I made the best use of my time 
and means, and there is no period of my life to winch 
I look back with such unmingled satisfaction." 

He had passed within a zone of thought new to him- 
self, and up to that time quite unknown in England ; 
one of the great intellectual movements which occur 
but rarely, and at long intervals, in the world's history. 
The philosophic genius of Germany which awoke in 
Kant during the latter part of last century was an im- 
pulse the most original, the most far-reaching, and the 
most profound, which Europe has seen since the Ref- 
ormation. It has given birth to linguistic science, has 
recast metaphysics, and has penetrated history, poetry, 
and theology. For good or for evil, it must be owned 
that, under the shadow of this great movement, the 
world is now living, and is likely to live more or less 
for some time to come. Perhaps we should not call it 
German philosophy, for philosophy is but one side of a 
great power which is swaying not only the world's 
thought, but those feelings which are the parents of its 
\f thoughts, as well as of its actions and events. If asked 
to give in a sentence the spirit of this great movement, 
most men in this country would feel constrained to an- 
swer, as the great German sage is reported to have an- 
swered Cousin, " These things do not sum themselves up 
in single sentences." If any one still insists on a form- 
ula, he must seek it from some adroit French critic who 
will clench the whole thing for him in a phrase, or at 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 121 

most a sentence. Into this great atmosphere, define it 
how you will, then seething and fermenting, it was that 
Coleridge passed. Most of his fourteen months were, 
no doubt, given to acquiring the language, but he could 
not mingle with those professors and students without 
catching some tincture of that way of thought which 
was then busy in all brains. It was not, however, till 
after his return to England that he studied Kant and 
other German j>hilosophers. His name will ever be 
historically associated with the first attempt to intro- 
duce these new thoughts to the English mind, which, 
having been for more than a century steeped to reple- 
tion in Lockeism, was now sadly in need of other ali- 
ment. Some have reviled Coleridge because he did 
not know that whole cycle of thought so fully as they 
suppose that they themselves do. As if anything so 
all-embracing as German philosophy can be taken in 
completely at once ; as if the first delver in any mine 
ever yet extracted the entire ore. But to such impugn- 
ers it were enough to say, We shall listen with more 
patience to your accusations, when you have done one 
half as much to bring home the results of German 
thought to the educated British mind now, as Coleridge 
did in his day. 

The first fruits, however, of his newly acquired Ger- 
man were poetic, not philosophic. Arriving in London 
in November, 1799, he set to work to translate 
Schiller's " Wallenstein," and accomplished in three 
weeks what many competent judges regard as, notwith- 
standing some inaccuracies, the finest translation of any 
poem into the English language. It is a free transla- 
tion, with here and there some lines of Coleridge's own 
added where the meaning seemed to him to require it. 
At the time, the translation fell almost dead from the 
press, but since that day it has come to be prized as it 
deserves. 



122 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

In the autumn of 1799, Coleridge joined Wordsworth 
on a tour among the lakes, that tour on which the lat- 
ter fixed on the Town-End of Grasmere for his future 
home. This was Coleridge's first sight of English 
mountains. Rydal and Grasmere, he says, gave him 
the deepest delight; Haweswater kept his eyes dim 
with tears. During the last days of the year, Words- 
worth, with his sister, walked over the Yorkshire fells, 
and settled in their new home. From this time for- 
ward, Coleridge wrote for the " Morning Post," off and 
on, till the close of 1802. About Coleridge's contri- 
butions to that paper, there has been maintained, since 
his death, a debate which hardly concerns us here. 
Enough to say, that having originally agreed with Fox 
in opposing the French war in 1800, and having at 
that time written violently against Pitt in the " Morn- 
ing Post" and elsewhere, he was gradually separated 
from the leader of the opposition by the independent 
view he took against Napoleon, as the character of the 
military despot gradually unfolded itself. Coleridge 
passed over to the Tories, as he himself says, " only in 
the sense in which all patriots did so at that time, by 
refusing to accompany the Whigs in their almost perfid- 
ious demeanor towards Napoleon. Anti-ministerial 
they styled their policy, but it was really anti-national. 
It was exclusively in relation to the great feud with 
Napoleon that I adhered to the Tories. But because 
this feud was so capital, so earth-shaking, that it occu- 
pied all hearts, and all the councils of Europe, suffer- 
ing no other question almost to live in the neighbor- 
hood, hence it happened that he who joined the Tories 
in this was regarded as their ally in everything. Do- 
mestic politics were then in fact forgotten." 

But though he was constrained to come round to 
Pitt's foreign policy, he never, that I know, recanted 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 123 

the invectives with which he assailed that minister in 
1800. There is still extant, among " The Essays on 
his Own Times," a well-known character of Pitt from 
the pen of Coleridge, which appeared in the " Morning 
Post." Coleridge, in general fair-minded and far-see- 
ing, had one or two strange and unaccountable antip- 
athies to persons, which Wilson mentions, and this 
against Pitt was perhaps the strongest and the blindest. 
On the day that the character of Pitt appeared, the 
character of Bonaparte was promised for " to-morrow," 
but that to-morrow never arrived. What that portrait 
would have been may perhaps be gathered from a par- 
agraph on the same subject, contained in Appendix B 
to the first " Lay Sermon." The will, dissevered from 
conscience and religion, " becomes Satanic pride and 
rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to 
itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others ; 
the more hopeless as the more obdurate by the subju- 
gation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and 
pain and pleasure ; in short, by the fearful resolve to 
find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, 
under which all other motives from within and from 

without must be either subordinated or crushed 

This is the character which Milton has so philosoph- 
ically, as well a ssublimely, embodied in the Satan of 
his ' Paradise Lost ' — Hope in which there is no 
cheerfulness ; steadfastness within and immovable re- 
solve, with outward restlessness and whirling activity ; 
violence with guile ; temerity with cunning ; and, as 
the result of all, interminableness of object with per- 
fect indifference of means — these are the marks that 
have characterized the masters of mischief, the liberti- 
cides, and mighty hunters of mankind, from Nimrod to 
Bonaparte By want of insight into the possibil- 
ity of such a character, whole nations have been so far 



124 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

duped as to regard with palliative admiration, instead 
of wonder and abhorrence, the Molochs of human na- 
ture, who are indebted for the larger portion of their 
meteoric success to their total want of principle, and 
who surpass the generality of their fellow-creatures in 
one act of courage only, that of daring to say with their 
whole heart, i Evil, be thou my good ! ' All system is 
so far power ; and a systematic criminal, self-consistent 
and entire in wickedness, who entrenches villainy within 
villainy, and barricades crime by crime, has removed a 
world of obstacles by the mere decision that he will 
have no other obstacles but those of force and brute 
matter." 

It must have been early in 1801 that Coleridge 
turned his back for a time on London and the " Morn- 
ing Post," to transfer his family to the Lakes, and set- 
tle them at Greta Hall. The landlord of it was a Mr. 
Jackson, the " Master " of Wordsworth's poem of the 
" Wagoner." From this house, destined to become 
Southey's permanent earthly home, Coleridge writes 
to Southey, then in Portugal, this description of it : 
" In front we have a giant's camp, an encamped army 
of tent-like mountains, which, by an inverted arch, 
gives a view of another vale [meaning, I suppose, the 
range of peaks which close the head of the Newlands' 
vale]. On our right the lovely vale and wedge-shaped 
lake of Bassenthwaite ; and on our left, Derwentwater 
and Lodore in full view, and the fantastic mountains 
of Borrowdale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, 
green, high, with two chasms, and a tent-like ridge in 
the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all 
your wanderings." There Southey soon joined Cole- 
ridge, and the two kindred families shared Greta Hall 
together, a common home with two doors. 

Coleridge was now at the full manhood of his 



SAM DEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 125 

powers ; lie was about thirty, and the time was come 
when the marvelous promise of youth ought to have 
had its fulfillment. He was surrounded with a coun- 
try which, if any could, might have inspired him, with 
friends beside him who loved and were ready in any 
way to aid him. But the next fifteen years, the prime 
strength of his life, when his friends looked for fruit, 
and he himself felt that it was due, were all but unpro- 
ductive. The " Ode to Dejection," written at the be- 
ginning of the Lake time, and " Youth and Age," 
written just before its close, with two or three more 
short pieces, are all his poetry of this period, and they 
fitly represent the sinking of heart and hope which 
were now too habitual with him. What was the cause 
of all this failure ? Bodily disease, no doubt, in some 
measure, and the languor of disease depressing a will 
by nature weak and irresolute. But more than these, 
there was a worm at the root that was sapping his 
powers, and giving fatal effect to his natural infirmities. 
This process had already set in, but it was some years 
yet before the result was fully manifest. During 
these first years at the Lakes, though Greta was his 
home, Coleridge, according to De Quincey, was more 
often to be found at Grasmere. This retirement, for 
such it then was, had for him three attractions, a love- 
liness more complete than that of Derwentwater, an 
interesting and pastoral people not to be found at 
Keswick, and above all, the society of Wordsworth. 
It was about this time that there arose the name of 
the Lake School, a mere figment of the " Edinburgh 
Review," which it invented to express its hatred of 
three original writers, each unlike the other, and all 
agreeing only in one thing, their opposition to the hard 
and unimaginative spirit which was then the leading 
characteristic of the " Edinburgh." How unlike 



126 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

Wordsworth and Coleridge really were in their way 
of thinking and working may be now clearly seen by 
comparing the works they have left behind. And as 
for Southey and Wordsworth, they had but little in 
common, and were not even on friendly terms till more 
than ten years after the Lake School was first talked 
of. Likely enough Coleridge found Wordsworth more 
original and suggestive than Southey. But the single- 
ness and wholeness of moral purpose which inspired 
the lives of both his friends, must have been to Cole- 
ridge a continual rebuke ; and Southey, as being a near 
relation, and a closer observer of the domestic unhap- 
piness caused by Coleridge's neglects, had perhaps 
added to the silent reproof of his own example more 
open remonstrance. 

In August, 1803, Wordsworth and his sister visited 
Coleridge at Keswick, and took him with them on that 
first tour in Scotland of which Wordsworth, and his 
sister too, have left such imperishable memorials. 
Most of the way they walked, from Dumfries up 
Nithsdale, over Crawfordmuir by the Falls of Clyde, 
and so on to Loch Lomond. Coleridge being in poor 
health and worse spirits than usual, and somewhat too 
much in love with his own dejection, left his two com- 
panions somewhere about Loch Lomond to return 
home. But either at this or some other time not 
specially recorded, he must have got further north, for 
we find him, in his second " Lay Sermon," speaking of 
his solitary walk from Loch Lomond to Inverness, and 
describing the impression made upon him both by the 
sight of the recently unpeopled country, and by the 
story he heard from an old Highland widow near Fort 
Augustus, of the wrongs she herself, her kinsfolk and 
her neighbors, had suffered in those sad clearances. 
But if Scotland woke in him no poetry on this his first 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 127 

and perhaps only visit, and if Scotchmen have had 
some severe things said of them by him, they can af- 
ford to pardon them. The land is none the less beau- 
tiful for not having been sung by him ; and if from 
the people he could have learned some of that shrewd- 
ness of which they have enough and to spare, his life 
would have been other and happier than it was. 

If the Lake country had suited Coleridge's constitu- 
tion, and if he had turned to advantage the scenery and 
society it afforded, in no part of England, it might 
seem, could he have found a fitter home. But the 
dampness of the climate brought out so severely the 
rheumatism from which he had suffered since boyhood, 
that he was forced to seek a refuge from it on the 
shores of the Mediterranean, — a doubtful measure, it 
is said, for one in his state of nerves. Arriving at 
Malta in April, 1804, he soon became known to the 
Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, and during a change of 
secretaries Coleridge served for a time as a temporary 
secretary. The official task-work, and not less the offi- 
cial parade, expected from him, which he never at- 
tempted to maintain, were highly distasteful to him, 
and he gladly resigned, as soon as a new secretary 
came out. He made, however, the friendship of the 
Governor, whose character he has painted glowingly in 
" The Friend." Whether Sir Alexander Ball merited 
this high encomium I cannot say, but Professor Wilson 
mentions that Coleridge's craze for the three B's, Ball, 
Bell, and Bowyer, was a standing joke among his 
friends. The health he sought at Malta he did not 
find. The change at first seemed beneficial, but soon 
came the reaction, — " limbs like lifeless tools, violent 
internal pains, laboring and oppressed breathing." For 
relief from these he had recourse to the sedative, 
which he had begun to use so far back as 1796, and 



128 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

the habit became now fairly confirmed. Leaving Malta 
in September, 1805, he came to Rome, and there spent 
some time in seeing what every traveller sees, but 
what Coleridge would see with other eyes and keener 
insight than most men. Full observations on these 
things he noted down for after use. There, too, he 
made the acquaintance of the German poet Tieck, of 
an American painter, Allston, and of Humboldt, the 
brother of the great traveller. Gilman informs us that 
Coleridge was told by Humboldt that his name was on 
the list of the proscribed at Paris, owing to an article 
which he (Coleridge) had written against Bonaparte 
in the " Morning Post ; " that the arrest had already 
been sent to Rome, but that one morning Coleridge 
was waited on by a noble Benedictine, sent to him by 
the kindness of the Pope, bearing a passport signed by 
the Pope, and telling him that a carriage was ready to 
bear him at once to Leghorn. Coleridge took the 
hint ; at Leghorn embarked on board of an American 
vessel sailing for England ; was chased by a French 
ship ; and was, during the chase, forced by the captain 
to throw overboard all his papers, and among them his 
notes and observations made in Rome. So writes Cole- 
ridge's biographer. Wilson laughs at the thought of 
the Imperial eagle stooping to pursue such small game 
as Coleridge. And certainly it does seem hardly cred- 
ible that Bonaparte should have so noted the secrets 
of the London newspaper press, or have made such 
efforts to lay hands on one stray member of that corps. 
De Quincey, however, argues from Bonaparte's char- 
acter and habits that the thing was by no means im- 
probable. 

It is hardly worth while to attempt to trace all the 
changes of his life for the next ten years after his re- 
turn from Malta. Sometimes at Keswick, where his 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 129 

family still lived ; sometimes with Wordsworth at the 
Town-End of Grasmere ; sometimes in London, living 
in the office of the " Courier," and writing for it ; 
sometimes lecturing at the Koyal Institution, often, 
according to De Quincey, disappointing his audience by 
non-appearance ; anon an inmate in Wordsworth's new 
home at Allan Bank, while " The Excursion " was 
being composed; then taking final farewell of the 
Lakes in 1810, travelling with Basil Montagu to Lon- 
don, and leaving his family at Keswick, for some years, 
under care of Southey ; domiciled now with Basil 
Montagu, now with a Mr. Morgan at Hammersmith, or 
Calne, now with other friends in or not far from Lon- 
don ; so passed with him those homeless, aimless, 
wasted years of middle manhood. No doubt there 
were bright spots here and there, when his marvelous 
powers found vent in lecturing on some congenial sub- 
ject, or flowed forth in that stream of thought and 
speech which was his native element. During these 
wanderings he met now and then with the wits of the 
time, either in rivalry not of his own seeking, or in 
friendly .intercourse. Scott has recorded a rencounter 
he had with Coleridge at a dinner party, when some 
London litterateurs sought to lower Scott by pitting 
Coleridge against him. Coleridge had been called on 
to recite some of his own unpublished poems, and had 
done so. Scott, called on to contribute his share, 
refused, on the plea that he had none to produce, but 
offered to recite some clever lines which he had lately 
read in a newspaper. The lines were the unfortunate 
u Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,'' of which Coleridge 
was the then unacknowledged author. It is amusing 
to see the two sides of the story ; the easy, off-hand 
humor with which Scott tells it in a letter, or in his 
journal ; and the laborious self-defense with which 
9 



130 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

Coleridge ushers in the lines in his published poems. 
More friendly was his intercourse with Lord Byron, 
who, while he was lessee of a London theatre, had 
brought forward Coleridge's " Remorse," and had taken 
much interest in its success. This brought the two 
poets frequently into company, and in April, 1816. 
Coleridge thus speaks of Byron's appearance : " If 
you had seen Lord Byron you could scarcely disbelieve 
him. So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw ; 
his teeth so many stationary smiles ; his eyes the open 
portals of the sun — things of light, and made for light ; 
and his forehead, so ample, and yet so flexible, passing 
from marble smoothness into a hundred wreaths and 
lines and dimples, correspondent to the feelings and 
sentiments he is uttering." But lecturing, or conversa- 
tion, or intercourse with brother poets, even taken at 
their best, are but a poor account to give of the prime 
years of such genius as Coleridge was intrusted with. 

The record of his writings from 1801 till 1816 con- 
tains only one work of real importance. This was 
" The Friend," a periodical of weekly essays, intended 
to help to the formation of opinions on moral, political, 
and artistic subjects, grounded upon true and permanent 
principles. Undertaken with the countenance of, and 
with some slight aid from, Wordsworth, it began to be 
published in June, 1809, and ceased in March, 1810, be- 
cause it did not pay the cost of publishing, which Cole- 
ridge had imprudently taken on himself. The original 
work having been much enlarged and recast, was pub- 
lished again in its present three-volume form in 1818. 
Even as it now stands, the ground-swell after the great 
French Revolution tempest can be distinctly felt. It 
is full of the political problems cast up by the troubled 
waters of the then recent storm, and of the attempt to 
discriminate between the first truths of morality and 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 131 

maxims of political expediency, and to ground each on 
their own proper basis. No one can read this work 
without feeling the force of Southey's remark : " The 
vice of ' The Friend ' is its round-aboutness." But 
whoever will be content to bear with this and to read 
right on, will find all through fruit which will more 
than repay the labor, with essays here and there which 
are nearly perfect both in matter and in form. But 
its defects, such as they are, must have told fatally 
against its success when it appeared as a periodical. It 
was Coleridge's misfortune in this, as in so many of his 
works, to have to try to combine two things, hard, if 
not impossible to reconcile, — popularity that will pay, 
and thought that will elevate. The attempt to dig 
deep, and to implant new truths which can only be 
taken in by painful thought, finds small favor with most 
readers of periodicals. Few writers have attained pres- 
ent popularity and enduring power, and least of all 
could Coleridge do so. " The Friend " contains in its 
present, and probably it did in its first shape, clear 
indications of the change that Coleridge's mind had 
gone through in philosophy, as well as in his religious 
belief. But of this we shall have to speak again. 
This middle portion of Coleridge's life may, perhaps, be 
not inaptly closed by the description of his appearance 
and manner, as these appeared to De Quincey when he 
first saw him in 1807 : — 

" I had received directions for finding out the house 
where Coleridge was visiting; and in riding down a 
main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway cor- 
responding to the description given me. Under this 
was standing and gazing about him a man whom I will 
describe. In height he might seem to be about five 
feet eight (he was in reality about an inch and a half 
taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the 



132 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

height) ; his person was tall and full, and tended even 
to corpulence ; his complexion was fair, though not 
what painters technically style fair, because it was 
associated with black hair ; his eyes were large and 
soft in their expression ; and it was from the peculiar 
appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with 
their light that I recognized my object. This was 
Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute 
or more, and it struck me that he saw neither myself 
nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep 
reverie, for I had dismounted and advanced close to 
him before he had apparently become conscious of my 
presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my 
name, first awoke him ; he started, and for a moment 
seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own 
situation. There was no mauvaise Jionte in his manner, 
but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in 
recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This 
little scene over, he received me with a kindness of 
manner so marked that it might be called gracious. 
The hospitable family with whom he was domesticated 
all testified for Coleridge deep affection and esteem ; 
sentiments in which the whole town of Bridgewater 

seemed to share 

" Coleridge led me to the drawing-room, rang the 
bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a court- 
eous reception That point being settled, Cole- 
ridge, like some great Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, 
that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or 
thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of 
waters, and its mighty music, swept at once, as if re- 
turning to his natural business, into a continuous strain 
of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the 
most finely illuminated, and traversing the most spa- 
cious fields of thought, by transitions the most just 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 133 

and logical that it was possible to conceive To 

many people, and often I have heard the complaint, 
he seemed to wander ; and he seemed then to wander 
the most when in fact his resistance to the wandering 
instinct was greatest, namely, when the compass and 
huge circuit by which his illustrations moved, trav- 
elled furthest into remote regions, before they began 
to revolve. Long before this coming round com- 
menced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough 
supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to 
admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did 
not see their relations to the dominant theme. How- 
ever, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowl- 
edge of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe 
was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as gram- 
mar from his language." 

Admirable as in the main the essay is from which 
this sketch is taken, it contains some things which one 
could wish unwritten. De Quincey dwells on some 
alleged faults of Coleridge with a loving minuteness 
which the pure love of truth can hardly account for ; 
and with regard to the great and all-absorbing fault, 
the habit of opium-taking, his statements are directly 
opposed to those made by Coleridge himself, and by 
his friends who had the best means of knowing the 
truth. He says that Coleridge first took to opium, 
u not as a relief from bodily pains or nervous irrita- 
tions, for his constitution was naturally strong and 
excellent, but as a source of luxurious sensations." 
Here De Quincey falls into two errors. First, Cole- 
ridge's constitution was not really strong. Though 
full of life and energy, his body was also full of dis- 
ease, which gradually poisoned the springs of life. His 
letters bear witness to this, by the many complaints 
of ill health which they contain, before he ever touched 



134 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

opium. Again, as we have already seen, what he 
sought in opium was not pleasurable sensations, but 
freedom from pain, — an antidote to the nervous agi- 
tations under which he suffered. But whatever may 
have been the beginning of the habit, the result of 
continued indulgence in it was equally disastrous. We 
have already seen the letter which notes his first re- 
course to the fatal drug in 1796. As his ailments 
increased, so did his use of it. At Malta, opium-taking 
became a con tinned habit, and from that time for ten 
years it quite overmastered him. In 1807, the year 
when De Quincey first met him, he writes of himself 
as "rolling rudderless," with an increasing and over- 
whelming sense of wretchedness. The craving went 
on growing, and his consumption of the drug had, by 
1814, reached a quite appalling height. Cottle, then, 
on meeting Coleridge, saw what a wreck he had be- 
come, discovered the fatal cause, and took courage to 
remonstrate by letter. Coleridge makes no conceal- 
ment, pleads guilty to the evil habit, and confesses 
that he is utterly miserable. Sadder letters were per- 
haps never written than those cries out of the depths 
of his agony. He tells Cottle that he had learned 
what " sin is against an imperishable being, such as is 
the soul of man ; that he had had more than one 
glimpse of the outer darkness and the worm that dieth 
not; that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven 
were at that moment offered to his choice, he would 
prefer the former." More pitiful still is that letter to 
his friend Wade : " In the one crime of opium, what 
crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude 
to my Maker ; and to my benefactors injustice ; and 

unnatural cruelty to my poor children After 

my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unquali- 
fied narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 135 

cause, may be made public, that at least some little 
good may be effected by the direful example." It is 
painful to dwell on these things, nor should they have 
been reproduced here, had it been possible to have 
given a true picture of the man, without touching on 
this, the dark side of his character. 

Strange and sad as it is to think that one so gifted 
should have fallen so low, it is hardly less strange 
that from that degradation he should ever have been 
enabled to rise. The crisis seems to have come about 
the time when those letters passed between Cottle and 
him in 1814. For some time there followed a struggle 
against the tyrant vice, by various means, but all seem- 
ingly ineffectual. At last he voluntarily arranged to 
board himself with the family of Mr. Gilman, a physi- 
cian, who lived at Highgate, in a retired house, in an 
airy situation surrounded by a large garden. It was in 
April, 1816, that he first entered this house at High- 
gate, which continued to be his home for eighteen 
years till his death. The letter in which he opens his 
grief to Mr. Gilman, and commends himself to his care, 
is very striking, showing at once his strong desire to 
overcome the inveterate habit, and his feeling of in- 
ability to do so, unless he were placed under a watchful 
eye and external restraint. In this home he learned 
to abandon opium, and here, though weighed down by 
ever increasing bodily infirmity, and often by great 
mental depression, he found on the whole — 

" The best quiet to his course allowed." 

That the vice was overcome might be inferred from 
the very fact that his life was prolonged. And though 
statements to the contrary have been made from quar- 
ters whence they might least have been expected, there 
is, as I have learned from the most trustworthy author- 



136 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

ities still living, no ground for these statements. The 
friends of Coleridge, who have had best access to the 
truth, believe that at Highgate he obtained that self- 
mastery which he sought. No doubt, the habit left a 
bane behind it, a body shattered, a mind shorn of much 
of its strength for continuous effort, ever-recurring 
seasons of despondency and visitings of self-reproach 
for so much life wasted, so great powers given, so little 
achieved. No man ever felt more painfully than he 
the contrast between — 

" The petty Done, the Undone vast." 

But still, under all these drawbacks, he labored ear- 
nestly to redeem what of life remained ; and most of 
what is satisfactory to remember of his life belongs to 
those last eighteen years. It was a time of gathering 
up of the fragments that remained — of saving splinters 
washed ashore from the mighty wreck. To this time, 
such as it is, we owe most of that by which Coleridge 
is now known to men, and by which, if at all, he has 
benefited his kind. 

During those years the great religious change that 
had been long going on was completed and confirmed. 
As far back as 1800 his adherence to the Hartleian 
philosophy and his belief in Unitarian theology had 
been shaken. By 1805 he was in some sense a be- 
liever in the Trinity, and had entered on a closer 
study of Scripture, especially of St. Paul and St. John. 
There were in him, as De Quincey observed, the 
capacity of love and faith, of self-distrust, humility, and 
child-like docility, waiting but for time and sorrow to 
mature them. Such a discipline the long ineffectual 
struggle with his infirmity supplied. The sense of 
moral weakness, and of sin, working inward contrition, 
made him seek for a more practical, supporting faith 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 137 

than he had known in his early years. And so he 
learned that, while the consistency of Christianity with 
right reason and the historic evidence of miracles are 
the outworks, yet the vital centre of faith lies in the 
believer's feeling of his great need, and the experience 
that the redemption which is in Christ meets that 
need ; that it is the " sorrow rising from beneath and 
the consolation meeting it from above," the actual 
trial of the faith in Christ, which is its ultimate and 
most satisfying evidence. With him, too, as with so 
many before, it was credidi, ideoque intellexi. The 
Highgate time was also the period of his most pro- 
longed and undisturbed study. Among much other 
reading, the Old English divines were diligently pe- 
rused and commented on ; and his criticisms and reflec- 
tions on them fill nearly the whole of the third and 
fourth volumes of his " Literary Remains." A dis- 
criminating, often a severe critic of these writers, he 
was still a warm admirer, in this a striking contrast to 
Arnold, who certainly unduly depreciated them. 

Almost the whole of his prose works were the 
product of this time. First the " Two Lay Sermons," 
published in 1816 and 1827. Then the " Biographia 
Literaria," published in 1817, though in part composed 
some years before. In 1818 followed the recast and 
greatly enlarged edition of " The Friend ; " and in 
1825 he gave to the world the most mature of all his 
works, the " Aids to Reflection." Licorporated es- 
pecially with the earlier part of this work, are selec- 
tions from the writings of Archbishop Leighton, of 
which he has said that to him they seemed " next to 
the inspired Scriptures, yea, as the vibration of that 
once-struck hour remaining on the air." The main 
substance of the work, however, contains his own 
thoughts on the grounds of morality and religion, and 



138 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

of the relation of these to each other, along with his 
views on some of the main doctrines of the faith. The 
last work that appeared during his lifetime was that on 
"Church and State," published in 1830. After his 
death appeared his posthumous works, namely, the 
four volumes of " Literary Remains," and the small 
volume on the inspiration of Scripture, entitled " Con- 
fessions of an Inquiring Spirit." 

It is by these works alone, incomplete as many of 
them are, that posterity can judge of him. But the 
impression of overflowing genius which he left on his 
contemporaries was due not so much to his writings as 
to his marvelous talk. Printed books have made us 
undervalue this gift, or at best regard it more as a 
thing of display than as a genuine thought-communi- 
cating power. But as an organ of teaching truth, 
speech is older than books, and for this end Plato, 
among others, preferred the living voice to dead letters. 
Measured by this standard, Coleridge had no equal in 
his own, and few in any age. How his gift of dis- 
course in his younger days arrested Hazlitt and De 
Quincey, has been already seen ; and in his declining 
years at Highgate, when bodily ailments allowed, dur- 
ing the pauses of study and writing, fuller and more 
continuous than ever the mighty monologue streamed 
on. Some faint echoes of what then fell from him 
have been caught np and preserved in the well-known 
" Table-Talk," by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry 
Nelson Coleridge, who in his preface has finely de- 
scribed the impression produced by his uncle's conversa- 
tion on congenial listeners. To that retirement at 
Highgate flocked as on a pilgrimage most of what was 
brilliant in intellect or ardent in youthful genius at 
that day. Edward Irving, Julius Hare, Sterling, and 
manv more who miorht be named, were among his 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 139 

frequent and most devoted listeners. Most came to 
listen, wonder, and learn. But some came and went 
to shrug their shoulders, and pronounce it unintelligible, 
as Chalmers ; or in after years to scoff, as Mr. Carlyle. 
Likely enough this latter came craving a solution of 
some pressing doubt or bewildering enigma ; and to 
receive instead a prolonged and circuitous disquisition 
must to his then mood of mind have been tantalizing 
enough. But was it well done, great Thomas ! for 
this, years afterwards, to jeer at the old man's en- 
feebled gait, and caricature the tones of his voice ? 

In the summer of 1833 Coleridge was seen for the 
last time in public, at the meeting of the British Asso- 
ciation at Cambridge. Next year, on the 25th of July, 
he died in Mr. Gilman's house in The Grove, High- 
gate, which had been so long his home, and was laid 
hard by in his last" resting-place within the old church- 
yard by the roadside. 

Twelve days before his death, not knowing it to be 
so near, he wrote to his godchild this remarkable let- 
ter, 1 which, gathering up the sum of his whole life's 
experience, reads like his unconscious epitaph on him- 
self:— 

" My dear Godchild, — .... Years must pass 
before you will be able to read with an understanding 
heart what I now write ; but I trust that the all-gra- 
cious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
Father of mercies, who by his only begotten Son (all 
mercies in one sovereign mercy) has redeemed you 
from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of 
darkness, but into light ; out of death, but into life ; out 
of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our 

i This letter was written on the 13th, and he died on the 25th day of 
July. 



140 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

Righteousness, — I trust that He will graciously hear 
the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as 
the spirit of health and growth in body and mind. 

" .... I, too, your godfather, have known what 
the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and 
what the more refined pleasures which learning and 
intellectual power can bestow ; and with the ex- 
perience which more than threescore years can give, 
I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you 
(and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and 
act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, 
competence obtained by honorable industry a great 
blessing, and a great blessing it is to have kind, faith- 
ful, and loving friends and relatives ; but that the 
greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of 
all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have 
been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, 
a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, 
and infirmities; and for the last three or four years 
have, with a few and brief intervals, been confined to a 
sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness 
and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a 
recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal ; 
and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly 
bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, 
most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek 
Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and 
has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the 
inward peace that passe th all understanding, with the 
supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not 
withdraw his Spirit from me in the conflict, and in 
his own time will deliver me from the Evil One. 

" O, my dear godchild ! eminently blessed are those 
who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trust- 
ing wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 141 

Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, 
Jesus Christ. 

" O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your 
unseen godfather and friend, S. T. Coleridge." 

And now, perhaps, this sketch cannot close more 
fitly than in the affectionate words of his nephew, the 
faithful defender of the memory of his great uncle : — 

" Coleridge ! blessings on his gentle memory ! Cole- 
ridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed his peculiar 
weaknesses as well as his unique powers ; sensibilities 
that an averted look would rack, a heart which would 
beat calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He 
shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the 
preparatory agonies of his death-attack like a martyr. 
He suffered an almost life-long punishment for his 
errors, whilst the world at large has the un withering 
fruits of his labors, and his genius, and his sufferings." 

If I have traced in any measure aright the course of 
Coleridge's life, no more is needed to show what these 
failings and errors were. It more concerns us to ask 
what permanent fruit of all that he thought, and did, 
and suffered under the sun, there still remains, now 
that he has lain more than thirty years in his grave. 
To answer this fully is impossible in the case of any 
man, much more in the case of one who has been a 
great thinker rather than a great doer ; for many of 
his best ideas have so melted into the general atmos- 
phere of thought, that it is hard to separate them from 
the complex whole, and trace them back to their origi- 
nal source. But the abler men of his own generation 
were not slow to confess how much they owed to him. 
In poetry, Sir Walter Scott acknowledged himself as 
indebted to him for the opening key-note of " The Lay 



142 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

of tlie Last Minstrel." In the metre, sentiment, and 
drapery of that first canto, it is not difficult to trace the 
influence of " Christabel," then unpublished, but well 
known. Wordsworth, aloof from his contemporaries, 
and self-sufficing as he was, felt Coleridge to be his 
equal — " the only wonderful man I have ever known." 
Arnold, at a later day, called him the greatest intellect 
that England had produced within his memory, and 
shared with, perhaps learned from him, some of his 
leading thoughts, as that the identification of the church 
with the clergy was " the first and fundamental apos- 
tasy." Dr. Newman pointed to Coleridge's works long 
since as a proof that the minds of men in England were 
then yearning for something higher and deeper than 
what had satisfied the last age. Julius Hare speaks of 
him as " the great religious philosopher, to whom the 
mind of our generation in England owes more than to 
any other man." Mr. Maurice has everywhere spoken 
with deeper reverence of him than of any other teacher 
of these latter times. Even Mr. Mill has said that " no 
one has contributed more to shape the opinions among 
younger men, who can be said to have any opinions at 
all." 

But what need to note the impression he made here 
and there on single men, however eminent? He was 
the spirit-quickener not only of this man or that, but 
of his whole age. The greatest men of his time were 
the most susceptible of his influence, and the first to 
feel it — Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Irving, Wilson, 
Hazlitt, even Carlyle — on these, as has been lately 
said, he laid his spell, and " spoke through them." 
And partly through them, partly by his own immediate 
agency, he has since entered into the inner thought of 
every reflective man. For his was the most germina- 
tive mind England has this century given birth to. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 143 

Like a vast seed-field it lay, till the winds of inspiration 
wafted over it, blowing the seeds of his new thought 
over all the land. Incommensurable as Scott and 
Coleridge in all other respects are, lying as they do at 
the very opposite poles of thought, in one thing they 
are alike — the width of their operation. If the one 
by the vastness of his objective work changed the whole 
surface of society, not less widely or powerfully did the 
other by his penetrating subjectivity leaven it in its 
inmost depths. No really great man can be fully 
represented by his books, but few great men have left 
in their books so inadequate expressions of themselves 
as Coleridge has done. The living presence with the 
winged words, vivifying the minds of all hearers, has 
long been gone, and of all that matchless discourse, no 
trace remains but the few faint notices of those who 
heard it. Therefore, from the living eloquence to the 
silent books, we are forced reluctantly to turn, since 
these, though but a moiety of what he was, are all the 
permanent record of him that remains. 

These works are but fragments of his speculation, 
and this forms one difficulty in rightly estimating them. 
Another, and perhaps greater, lies in the width over 
which they range. Most original thinkers have devoted 
themselves to but a few lines of inquiry. Coleridge's 
thought may be almost said to have been as wide as 
life. To apply to himself the word which he first 
coined, or rather translated from some obscure Byzan- 
tian, to express Shakespeare's quality, he was a " myr- 
iad-minded man." He touched being at almost every 
point, and wherever he touched it, he opened up some 
new shaft of truth, and his books contain some frag- 
ment of what he saw. He who would fully estimate 
Coleridge's contributions to thought would have to con- 
sider him at least in these several aspects, as a poet, as 



144 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

a critic, as a political philosopher, as a moralist, and as 
a theologian. But without hazarding anything like so 
large an attempt, a few brief remarks may be offered 
on what he has done in some of these so widely differ- 
ent fields. 

It was as a poet that Coleridge was first known, and 
the wish has many times been expressed that he had 
stuck to poetry, and never tried philosophy. No doubt 
he had imagination enough, as some one has said, to 
have furnished forth a thousand poets, and " Christabel " 
will probably be read longer than any prose work lie 
has written. This, however, belongs both to the sub- 
stance and the form of all poetry that is perfect after its 
kind. But vast and vivid as Coleridge's imagination 
was, may not this power be as legitimately employed in 
interpenetrating and quickening the reason, and revivify- 
ing domains of philosophy, which are apt to grow narrow 
or dead through prosaic formalism, as in purely poetic 
creation ? Moreover, there were perhaps in Coleridge 
some special powers of fine analysis and introvertive 
speculation, which seem to have predestined him for 
other work than poetry ; just as there were some spe- 
cial wants, arising either from natural temperament or 
early education, which marred his poetic completeness. 
He had never lived much in the open air ; he had no 
large storehouse of facts or images, either drawn from 
observation of outward nature, or from more than 
common acquaintance with any modes of life or sides 
of human character, such as Wordsworth and Scott in 
different ways had. It was not the nature of his mind 
to dwell lovingly on concrete things, but rather, from its 
strong generalizing bias, to be borne off continually into 
the abstract. Therefore I cannot think that Coleridge, 
though he might have more delighted, would have done 
better service to mankind, if he had stuck wholly to 






SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 145 

poetry, or that he did otherwise than fulfill his destiny 
by giving way to the philosophic impulse. 

His daughter has said that he had four poetic epochs, 
representing, more or less, boyhood, early manhood, 
middle, and declining life. To trace these carefully is 
not for this place. The juvenile poems, those of the 
first epoch, though showing here and there hints of the 
coming power, contain, as a whole, nothing which would 
make them live, were it not for what came afterwards. 
He himself has said that these poems are disfigured by 
too great exuberance of double epithets, and by gen- 
eral turgidity. These mark, perhaps, the tumult of his 
thick-thronging thoughts, struggling to utter themselves 
with force and freshness, yet not quite disengaged from 
the old commonplaces of poetic diction, " eve's dusky 
car," and such-like, and from those frigid personifica- 
tions of abstract qualities in which the former age de- 
lighted. Of these early poems, one of the- most inter- 
esting is that on the death of Chatterton, in which, 
though the form somewhat recalls the odes of Collins 
and Gray, his native self here and there breaks through. 
Some of them are pensive with his early sorrow, others 
fierce and turbid with his revolutionary fervor. The 
longest and most important, styled " Religious Mus- 
ings," though Bowles ranked it high, might easily, not- 
withstanding some fine thoughts, suggest one of his 
rhapsodies in a Unitarian chapel cut into blank verse. 
The religious sentiments it contains are frigid and bom- 
bastic ; the politics denunciatory of existing things, of — 

" Warriors, lords, and priests, all the sore ills 
That vex and desolate our mortal life." 

They contain, however, some true thoughts, well put, 
though tinged with his Revolution dreams, on the good 
and evil that have sprung out of the institution of 
10 



146 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

property, and a fine apostrophe to all the sin-defiled 
and sorrow-laden ones, whose day of deliverance yet 
waits. 

It had been well if the poems of the second period, 
which were mostly written during the Bristol and 
Nether Stowey periods, and now make up the chief 
part of the " Sibylline Leaves," had been arranged in 
the order in which they were composed. This would 
have thrown much light on them, arising as they do 
either out of the events of the time or of Coleridge's 
personal circumstances. Compared with those of the 
former period, the stream flows more even and un- 
broken. The crude philosophy has all but disappeared, 
the blank verse is now more fused and melodious, the 
rhythm of thought more mellow, the religious senti- 
ment, where it does appear, no longer reasoning, but 
meditative, is more chastened and deep. These poems 
it must have been, which were to De Quincey " the 
ray of a new morning, a revealing of untrodden worlds, 
till then unsuspected amongst nien." Such Wilson 
found them, and so in a measure they have been to 
many since. In re-reading them, after an interval of 
years, this is perhaps felt less vividly. Is it that time 
has diminished the keen sense of their originality ; 
that the new fragrance they once gave forth has so 
filled the poetic atmosphere that it makes itself now 
less distinctly felt ? However this may be, such acci- 
dents of personal feeling do not affect their real worth. 
Of two fine poems written at Clevedon, the one on the 
" JEolian Harp " contains a passage that may be com- 
pared with the well-known so-called Pantheistic pas- 
sage in Wordsworth's " Tin tern Abbey." The other, 
" Reflections on leaving a place of Retirement," breathes 
a beautiful though too brief spirit of happiness and 
content. In the same gentle vein are the " Lines to 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 147 

his Brother George," and "Frost at Midnight," in 
finely balanced and beautifully modulated blank verse. 
But higher and of wider compass are the three polit- 
ical poems, the ode on " The Departing Year," written 
at the close of 1796, " France," an ode, written in 
February, 1797, and "Tears in Solitude," in 1798. 
The last of these opens and closes with some of his 
best blank verses, full of lambent light and his own 
exquisite .music, though the middle is troubled with 
somewhat intemperate politics, pamphleteeringly ex- 
pressed. The ode on " France," when his fond hopes 
of the Revolution had ended in disappointment, is a 
strain of noblest poetry. It opens with a call on the 
clouds, the waves, the sun, the sky, all in nature that 
is most free, to bear witness — 

" With what deep worship I have still adored 
The spirit of divinest Liberty." 

And closes with these grand lines : — 

" Liberty ! with profitless endeavor 
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; 
But thou nor swell' st the victor's strain, nor ever 
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power; 
Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee 
(Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee), 
Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, 
And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, 
Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, 
The guide of homeless winds, the playmate of the waves ! 
And there, I felt thee ! on that sea-cliffs verge, 
Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, 
Had made one murmur with the distant surge ! 
Yes ! while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, 
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, 
Possessing all things with intensest love, 
O Liberty, my spirit felt thee there ! " 

Equal, perhaps, to any of the above, are the lines 
he addressed to Wordsworth, after hearing that poet 
read aloud the first draft of " The Prelude : " — 



148 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

" An Orphic song indeed, 
A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts, 
To their own music chanted ! . . . . 
And when, friend ! my comforter and guide ! 
Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength, 
Thy long-sustained song finally closed, 
And thy deep voice had ceased — yet thou thyself 
Wert still before my eyes, and round us both 
That happy vision of beloved faces — 
Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close, 
I sat, my being blended in one thought 
(Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) 
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound — 
And when I rose, I found myself in prayer." 

Of the " Ancient Mariner " and " Christabel," the 
two prime creations of the Nether Stowey period, 
nothing need be said. Time has now stamped these 
with the signet of immortality. The view with which 
these two masterpieces were begun, as the brother 
poets walked on the green heights of Quantock, has 
been detailed elsewhere. Coleridge was to choose 
supernatural or romantic characters, and clothe them 
from his own imagination with a human interest and 
a semblance of truth. It would be hard to analyze the 
strange witchery that is in both, especially in " Chris- 
tabel ; " the language so simple and natural, yet so 
aerially musical, the rhythm so original, yet so fitted 
to the story, and the glamour over all, a glamour so 
peculiar to this one poem. The first part belongs to 
Quantock, the second was composed several years later 
at the Lakes, yet still the tale is but half told. Would 
it have gained or lost in power had it been completed ? 

It has been asked whether there is in Coleridge's 
poetry any trace of the peculiar vein of thought which 
afterwards appeared in him as philosophy. There is 
first a delicacy and subtlety of thought and imagery 
strange to English poets for at least two centuries. It 
is in him we find — 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. M9 

" The stilly murmur of the distant sea 
Tells us of silence." 

His, too, is — 

u A dream remembered in a dream," 

and his — 

11 Her voice that even in its mirthful mood 
Hath made me wish to steal away and weep." 

In him too it is that the vision of Mont Blanc awakens 
that idealism — 

11 Most dread and silent mount ! I gazed upon thee 
Till thou, still present to my bodily sense, 
Hadst vanished from my thought ; entranced in prayer, 
I worshipped the Invisible alone." 

But besides these separate subtleties, are they mis- 
taken who see in the unearthly weirdness of the u An- 
cient Mariner," and the mysterious witchery of " Chris- 
tabel " those very mental elements in solution which, 
condensed and turned inward, would find their most 
congenial place in " the exhausting atmosphere of trans- 
cendental ideas ? " 

His third poetic epoch includes his whole sojourn at 
the Lakes, and the fourth the remainder of his life. 
The poems of these two periods are few altogether, 
and what there are, more meditative than formerly, 
sometimes even hopelessly dejected. " Youth and 
Age," written just before leaving the Lakes, with a 
strangely aged tone for a man of only seven or eight 
and thirty, has a quaint beauty ; to adapt its own 
words, it is like sadness, that "tells the jest without 
the smile." There are some pieces of this time, how- 
ever, in another strain, as the beautiful lines called 
" The Knight's Tomb," and " Recollections of Love." 
After the Lake time, there was still less poetry ; only 
when, as in the " Visionary Hope " and the " Pains of 
Sleep," the too frequent despondency or severe suffer- 



150 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

ing of his later years sought relief in brief verse. 
Yet, belonging to the third or fourth periods, there are 
short gnomic lines, in which, if the visionary has dis- 
appeared, the wisdom wrought by time and meditation 
is excellently condensed. Such are these : — 

" Frail creatures are we all ; to be the best 

Is but the fewest faults to have; 
Look thou then to thyself, and leave the rest 
To God, thy conscience, and the grave." 

Or the Complaint and Reply : — 

" How seldom, friend ! a good great man inherits 
Honors or wealth with all his toil and pains. 
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, 
If any man obtain that which he merits, 
Or any merit that which he obtains." 



" For shame, dear friend- ! forego this canting strain ; 
What wouldst thou have the good great man obtain ? 
Wealth, titles, salary, a gilded chain ; 
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain ? 
Goodness and greatness are not means, but ends ! 
Hath he not always treasures, always friends, 
The good great man ! — Three treasures, life, and light, 

And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath ; 
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, — 
Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death." 

If from his own poetry we pass to his judgments on 
the poetry of others, we shall see an exemplification 
of the adapted adage, " Set a poet to catch a poet." 
Here for once were fulfilled the necessary conditions 
of a critic or judge, in the highest sense ; that is, a 
man possessing in himself abundantly the originative 
poetic faculty which he is to judge of in others, com- 
bined with that power of generalization and delicate, 
patient analysis which, if poets possess, they but sel- 
dom express in prose. This is but another way of 
saying, that before a man can pass worthy judgment 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 151 

on a thing, he must know that thing at first and not at 
second hand. The other kind of critic is he who, 
though with little or none of the poetic gift in himself, 
has yet, from a careful study of the great master-mod- 
els of the art, deduced certain canons by which to 
judge of poetry universally. But a critic of this kind, 
as the world has many a time seen, whenever he is 
called upon to estimate some new and original work of 
Art, like to which the past supplies no models, is 
wholly at fault. His canons no longer serve him, and 
the native sympathetic insight he has not. To judge 
aright in such a case takes another order of critic ; one 
who knows after another and more immediate manner 
of knowing ; one who does not judge merely by what 
the past has done, but who, by the poet's heart within 
him, is made quick to welcome whatever new thing, 
however seemingly irregular, the young time may 
bring forth. Such a critic was Coleridge, An imag- 
ination richer and more penetrative than that of most 
poets of his time ; a power of philosophic reflection 
and of subtle discrimination, almost over-active ; a sym- 
pathy and insight of marvelous universality ; and a 
learning " laden with the spoils of all times," — these 
things made him the greatest — I had almost said 
the only truly philosophic — critic England had yet 
seen. 

Of his critical power, the two most eminent exam- 
ples are his chapters on Wordsworth's poetry in the 
" Biographia Literaria," and his notes on Shakespeare 
in the " Literary Remains." If a man wished to learn 
what genuine criticism should be, where else in our 
country's literature would he find so worthy a model as 
in that dissertation on Wordsworth? An excellent 
authority has lately said that the business of criticism 
is " to know the best thing that is known or thought i n 



152 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

the world, and to make this known to others." In 
these chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge has done 
something more than this. In opposition to the blind 
and utterly worthless criticism which Jeffrey then rep- 
resented, he thought out for himself, and laid down 
the principles on which Wordsworth or any poet such 
as he should be judged, and showed these principles to 
be grounded, not on caprices of the hour, but on the 
fundamental and permanent elements which human 
nature contains. He gave definitions of poetry in its 
essential nature, and showed more accurately than 
Wordsworth in his preface, wherein poetry really dif- 
fers from prose. Let any one who wishes to see the 
truth on these matters turn to Coleridge's description 
of the poet and his work, as they are in their ideal 
perfection. Then how truly and with what fine analy- 
sis he discriminates between the language of prose and 
of metre ! How good is his account of the origin of 
metre ! " This I would trace to the balance in the 
mind, effected by that spontaneous effort which strives 
to hold in check the workings of passion." There is 
more to be learned about poetry from a few pages of 
that dissertation, confined though it is to a specific 
kind of poetry, than from all the reviews that have 
been written in English on poets and their works from 
Addison to the present hour. Nor is the result of the 
whole a mere defense or indiscriminating eulogy on 
Wordsworth, rudely as that poet was then assailed by 
those who were also Coleridge's own revilers. From 
several of Wordsworth's theories about poetry he dis- 
sents entirely, especially from the whole of his remarks 
on the sameness of the language of prose and verse. 
At times, too, he finds fault with his practice, and lays 
his finger on faulty passages and defective poems 
here and there, in which he traces the influence of 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. lo3 

false theory ; while the true merits of these poems he 
places not on mere blind preference or individual taste, 
but on a solid foundation of principles. These prin- 
ciples few or none at that time acknowledged, but they 
have since won the assent of all competent judges. 
Canons of judgment they are, not mechanical, but liv- 
ing. They do not furnish the reader with a set of 
rules which he can take up and apply ready made. 
But they require, before they can be used aright, to be 
assimilated by thought — made our own inwardly. 
They open the eye to see, generate the power of 
seeing for one's self, call forth from within a living 
standard of judgment, which is based on truth and 
nature. 

Again, turning to his criticisms on Shakespeare and 
the Drama. They are but brief notes, scattered leaves, 
written by himself or taken down by others, from 
lectures given mainly in London. His lectures were 
in general wholly oral, and are said to have been best 
when delivered with no scrap of paper before him. 
But short as these notes are, they mark, and helped to 
cause, a revolution in men's ways of thinking about 
Shakespeare. First he taught, and himself exempli- 
fied, that he who would understand Shakespeare must 
not, Dr. Johnson-wise, seat himself on the critical 
throne, and thence deliver verdict, as on an inferior, 
or at best a mere equal ; but that he has need to come 
before all things with reverence, as for the poet of all 
poets, and that, wanting this, he wants one of the 
senses the "language of which he is to employ." 
Again, Coleridge was the first who clearly saw through 
and boldly denounced the nonsense that had been 
talked about Shakespeare's irregularity and extrava- 
gance. Before his time it had been customary to 
speak of Shakespeare as of some great abnormal 



154 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

creature, some fine but rude barbarian, full of all sorts 
of blemishes and artistic solecisms, which were to be 
tolerated for the sake of the beauties with which they 
were interlaid. In the face of all this, he ventured to 
ask, "Are then the plays of Shakespeare's works of 
rude and uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of 
the parts compensates for the barbarous shapelessness 
and irregularity of the whole ? Or is the form equally 
admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the poet 
not less deserving our admiration than his genius ? " 
The answer which he gave to his own question, and 
which he enforced with manifold argument, is in effect 
that the judgment of Shakespeare is as great as his 
genius ; " nay, that its genius reveals itself in his judg- 
ment as in its most exalted form." In arguing against 
those who at that time " were still trammeled with the 
notion of the Greek unities, and who thought that 
apologies were due for Shakespeare's neglect of them," 
he showed how the form of Shakespeare's dramas was 
suited to the substance, not less than the form of the 
Greek dramas to their substance. He pointed out the 
contrast between mechanical form superinduced from 
without, and organic form growing from within ; that 
if Shakespeare or any modern were to hold by the 
Greek dramatic unities, he would be imposing on his 
creations a dead form copied from without, instead of 
letting them shape themselves from within, and clothe 
themselves with their own natural and living form, as 
the tree clothes itself with its bark. Another point 
which Coleridge insists on in these lectures and 
throughout his works, a point often unheeded, some- 
times directly denied, is the close connection between 
just taste and pure morality, because true taste springs 
out of the ground of the moral nature of man. I can- 
not now follow him into detail, and show the new 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 155 

light which he has thrown on Shakespeare's separate 
plays, and on his leading characters. But it may be 
noticed in passing, that Hamlet was the character in 
the exposition of which Coleridge first proved his 
Shakespearean insight. In the " Table Talk " he says, 
" In fact, I have a smack of Hamlet in myself." If 
any one wishes to see what a really masterly elucida- 
tion of a subtle character is, let him turn to the 
remarks on Hamlet in the second volume of the 
" Literary Remains." This arid other of Coleridge's 
Shakespearean criticisms have been claimed for Schlegel. 
But most of these had, I believe, been given to the 
world in lectures before Schlegel's book appeared ; 
and as to this exposition of Hamlet, Hazlitt bears 
witness that he had heard it from Coleridge before his 
visit to Germany in 1798. That view of Hamlet has 
long since become almost a commonplace in literature, 
but the idea of it was first conceived and expressed by 
Coleridge. Some of the other criticisms may be more 
subtle than many may care to follow. But any one 
who shall master these notes on Shakespeare, taken as 
a whole, will find in them more fine analysis of the 
hidden things of the heart, more truthful insight into 
the workings of passion, than are to be found in whole 
treatises of psychology. 

Any survey of Coleridge's speculations would be 
incomplete if it did not include some account of his 
political philosophy, which holds so prominent a place 
ainoDg them. Not that he ever was a party politician, 
— his whole nature recoiled from that kind of work, — 
but his mind was too universal in its range, his sym- 
pathy with all human interests too strong, to have 
allowed him to pass by these questions. But the thor- 
ough and comprehensive survey of this department of 
Coleridge's thought, which occupies the greater part of 



156 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

Mr. Mill's well-known essay, makes any discussion of 
this subject here superfluous. There is however one 
important point to which this distinguished writer fails 
to advert. He speaks of Coleridge as an original 
thinker, but " within the bounds of traditional opinions," 
and as looking at received beliefs merely from within 
their pale. But it must surely have been known to 
Mr. Mill that Coleridge, during his youth and early 
manhood, stood as entirely outside of established opin- 
ions, and looked at existing institutions as purely from 
without as it was possible to do. No extremest young 
radical of the present hour, when intellectual radicalism 
has once again become a fashion, can question received 
beliefs more freely, or assail the established order more 
fearlessly, than Coleridge did in his fervid youth. The 
convictions on politics and religion, therefore, in which 
he ultimately rested, are entitled to the weight, what- 
ever it be, of having been formed by one who all his 
life long sought truth from every quarter, who for many 
years of his life stood not within, but entirely outside 
of traditionary beliefs ; and who, when his thought had 
gone full circle, became conservative, if that word is to 
be applied to him, not from self-interest or expediency, 
or from weariness of thinking, but after ample experi- 
ence and mature reflection. With this one remark on 
his political side I pass on. 

Criticism, such as I have described above, presup- 
poses profound and comprehensive thought on questions 
not lying within, but based on wider principles beyond, 
itself. His critical studies, if nothing else, would have 
driven Coleridge back on metaphysics. But it was the 
same with whatever subject he took up, whether art or 
politics, morals or theology. Everywhere he strove to 
reach the bottom, — to grasp the living idea which gave 
birth to the system or institution, and kept it alive. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 157 

Even in those of his works, as the " Literary Life,"' 
" The Friend," and the u Lay Sermons," which most 
enter into practical details, the granite every here and 
there crops out, the underlying philosophy appears. 
But that searching for fundamental principles, which 
seems to have been in him from the first an intellectual 
necessity, was increased by the morbidly introvertive 
turn of mind which, at some stages of his life, had 
nearly overbalanced him. In an often quoted passage 
from the " Ode to Dejection," written at Keswick in 
1802, he laments the decay within himself of the shap- 
ing imagination, and says that — 

..." By abstruse research to steal 
From my own nature all the natural man ; 
This was my sole resource, my only plan, 
Till that which suits a part infects the whole, 
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul." 

This passage opens a far glimpse into his mental 
history. It shows how metaphysics, for which he had 
from the first an innate propension, became from cir- 
cumstances almost an unhealthy craving. What then 
was his ultimate metaphysical philosophy ? This is 
not set forth systematically in any of his works, but we 
are left to gather it, as best we can, from disquisitions 
scattered through them all. And here, that unphilo- 
sophical readers may more clearly see Coleridge's place 
in the world of thought, I must recur to a few elemen- 
tary matters, which will seem trite enough to philo- 
sophical adepts. 

Every one knows that from the dawn of thought 
down to the present hour, the question as to the origin 
of knowledge has been the Sphinx's riddle to philos- 
ophers. This strange thing named Thought, what is 
it? This wondrous fabric we call Knowledge, whence 
comes it? It is a web woven out of something, but is 



158 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

it wholly or chiefly woven from outward materials, or 
mainly wrought by self-evolving powers from within ? 
Or, if due to the combined action of these, what part 
does each contribute ? How much is due to the raw 
material, how much to the weaver who fashions it? 
These questions, even if they be insoluble, will never 
cease to provoke the curiosity of every new generation 
of thoughtful men. There always has been a set of 
thinkers who have regarded outward things as the fixed 
reality which impresses representations of itself on mind 
as on a passive recipient. There has always existed 
also another set, which has held the mind to be a free 
creative energy, evolving from itself the laws of its own 
thinking, and stamping on outward things the forms 
which are inherent in its own constitution. The one 
school have held that outward things are genetic of 
knowledge, and that what are called laws of thought 
are wholly imposed on the mind by qualities which 
belong primarily to outward things. The others have 
maintained that it is the mind which is genetic, and that 
it in reality makes what it sees. This great question, 
as Mr. Mill has well said, " would not so long have 
remained a question, if the more obvious arguments on 
either side had been unanswerable." There must, how- 
ever, be a point of view, if we could reach it, from 
which these opposing tendencies of thought shall be 
seen to combine into one harmonious whole. But the 
man who shall achieve this final synthesis, and the age 
which shall witness it, are probably still far distant. 
Philosophic thought in Great Britain has in the main 
leaned towards the external side, towards that extreme 
which makes the mind out of the senses, and maintains 
experience to be the ultimate ground of all belief. 
This way of thinking, so congenial to the prevailing 
English temper, dates from at least as far back as 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 159 

Hobbes, but was first fairly established, almost like a 
part of the British Constitution, by the famous essay 
of Locke. In his polemic against innate ideas he 
asserted two sources of all knowledge. " Our observa- 
tion," he says, " employed either about external sensible 
things, or about the internal operations of our minds 
perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which 
supplies our understandings with materials of thinking. ,, 
The latter of these two sources, here somewhat vaguely 
announced, was never very strongly insisted on by 
Locke himself, and was by his followers speedily dis- 
carded. The full development of Locke's system is 
seen most clearly in Hume, who divided all the mind's 
furniture into impressions or lively perceptions, as when 
we see, hear, hate, desire, will ; and ideas or faint per- 
ceptions, which are copies of our sensible or lively im- 
pressions. So that with him all the materials of 
thought are derived from outward sense, or inward 
sentiment or emotion. 

Contemporary with Hume, and like him a follower 
of Locke, Hartley appeared at Cambridge, and carried 
out the same views to still more definite issues. He 
gathered up and systematized the materialistic views 
which were at that time floating about his University. 
Being, like Locke, a physician, he imported into his 
system a much larger amount of his professional knowl- 
edge, and sought to explain the movements of thought 
by elaborate physiological theories. He held that 
vibrations in the white medullary substance of the 
brain are the immediate causes of sensation, and that 
these first vibrations give birth to vibratiuncles or min- 
iatures of themselves, which are conceptions, or the 
simple ideas of sensible things. In another point he 
differed from Locke, in that, discarding Reflection, he 
brought more prominently forward Association, as the 



160 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

great weaving power of the mental fabric, which com- 
pounds all our ideas, and gives birth to all our faculties. 
Such theories as these were the chief philosophical 
aliment to be found in England when Coleridge was 
a young man. At Cambridge, having entered Hart- 
ley's college, where the name of that philosopher was 
still held in honor, Coleridge became his ardent dis- 
ciple. In the " Religious Musings," after Milton and 
Newton, he speaks of Hartley as — 

" He of mortal kind 
Wisest; the first who marked the ideal tribes 
Up the fine fibres to the sentient brain." 

Materialistic though his system was, Hartley was 
himself a believer in Christianity, and a religious man. 
His philosophical system came to be in high favor with 
Priestley and the Unitarians towards the end of last 
century ; so that when Coleridge became a Hartleian, 
he adopted Necessitarian views of the will, and Uni- 
tarian tenets in religion. A Materialist, a Necessita- 
rian, a Unitarian, such was Coleridge during his Cam- 
bridge and Bristol sojourn. But it was not possible 
that he should be permanently holden of these things. 
There were ideal lights and moral yearnings within 
him which these could never satisfy. The piece of 
divinity that was in him would not always do homage 
to Materialism. 

Before he visited Germany he had begun to awake 
out of his Hartleianism. It had occurred to him that 
all association — Hartley's great instrument — " pre- 
supposes the existence of the thought and images to 
be associated." In short, association cannot account 
for its own laws. All that association does is to use 
these laws, or latent a priori forms, to wit, contiguity 
of time and place, resemblance, contrast, so as to bring 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 161 

particular things under them. When two things have 
been thus brought together under one law — say con- 
tiguity in time — they may get so connected in thought 
that it becomes difficult to conceive them apart. But 
it never can be impossible so to conceive them ; that 
is, to separate them in thought. Further, he began 
to see that the hypothesis of all knowledge, being de- 
rived from sense, does not get rid of the need of a 
living intellectual framework, which makes these copies 
from sensible impressions. To take his own illustra- 
tion, the existence of an original picture, say Raphael's 
Transfiguration, does not account for the existence of 
a copy of it ; but rather the copyist must have put 
forth the same powers, and gone through the same 
process, as the first painter did when he made the 
original picture. Or take that instance, which is a 
kind of standing Hougoumont to sensational and ideal- 
istic combatants, — I mean causality, or the belief that 
every event must have a cause. Sensationalists, from 
Hume to Mr. Mill, have labored to derive this, the 
grand principle of all inductive reasoning, from invari- 
able experience. Mr. Mill's theory, the latest and 
most accredited from that side, thus explains it. He 
says that we arrive, by simple enumeration of individ- 
ual instances, first at one and then at another particu- 
lar uniformity, till we have collected a large number 
of such uniformities, or groups of cases in which the 
law of causation holds good. From this collection 
of the more obvious particular uniformities, in all of 
which the law of causation holds, we generalize the 
universal law of causation, or the belief that all things 
whatever have a cause ; and then we proceed to apply 
this law so generalized as an inductive instrument to 
discover those other particular laws which go to make 
up itself, but which have hitherto eluded our iuvestiga- 
11 



162 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

tion. Thus, according to this philosopher, we arrive 
at the universal law by generalizing from many laws 
of inferior generality. But as these last do not rest 
on rigid induction, but only on simple enumeration of 
instances, the universal law cannot lay claim to any 
greater cogency than the inferior laws on which it 
rests. One authenticated instance in which the law 
of causality does not hold may upset our belief in the 
universal validity of that law. And Mr. Mill accepts 
this consequence. He finds no difficulty in conceiving 
that there may be worlds in which it is so upset — in 
which events succeed each other at random, and by no 
fixed law. But this is really a reductio ad absurdum. 
This world of causeless disorder, which Mr. Mill finds 
no difficulty in conceiving, is simply inconceivable by 
any intelligence. If such a world were proved to 
exist, we should be compelled to believe that for this 
absence of order there is a cause, or group of causes ; 
just as we know there is a cause, or group of causes, 
for the presence of that order which we know to exist 
as far as our knowledge extends. This necessity to 
think a cause for every existence or event, a necessity 
which we cannot get rid of, forms the essential pecul- 
iarity of the notion of causality ; marking it out as a 
necessary form of thought, born from within, and not 
gathered from experience. That which is created by 
experience is strengthened by the same. But this 
belief that every event must have a cause, is one 
which, as soon as we have clearly comprehended the 
terms, we feel to be inevitable. Experience, no doubt, 
first brings this cognition out into distinct conscious- 
ness ; but as soon as we reflect on it, we discover that 
it must have been present as a constituent element 
of that very experience. Of causality, then, it may be 
said, what an able young metaphysician has lately said 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 163 

of time and space, "Themselves cognitions general- 
ized from experience, and, in that point of view, later 
than experience ; they are discovered to have been 
also elements of those very cognitions of experience 
from which they have been generalized, present in 
them as constituent elements, undistinguished before 

analysis They are elements of any and every 

particular experience, entering into every one of them 
as its necessary form." Or, as Coleridge put it, 
" Though first revealed to us by experience, they must 
yet have preexisted in order to make experience itself 
possible ; even as the eye must exist previously to any 
particular act of seeing, though by sight only can we 
know that we have eyes." And again, " How can we 
make bricks without straw, or build without cement ? 
We learn things, indeed, by occasion of experience ; 
but the very facts so learned force us inward on the 
antecedents that must be presupposed in order to ren- 
der experience itself possible." 

These and such like thoughts were sure to arise in a 
mind naturally so open to the idealistic side of thought 
as that of Coleridge, and to shake to pieces the mate- 
rialistic fabric in which he had for a time ensconced 
himself. And not merely intellectual misgivings would 
work this way, but the soul's deeper cravings. Driven 
by hunger of heart, he wandered from the school of 
Locke and Hartley, successively on through those of 
Berkeley, Leibnitz, and, I believe, Spinoza, and finding 
in them no abiding place, began to despair of philoso- 
phy. To this crisis of his history probably apply these 
words : — 

" I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in, broke 
upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell 
from the windows of heaven. The fontal truths of 
natural religion and the books of revelation alike con- 



164 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

tributed to the flood ; and it was long ere my ' ark 
touched on an Ararat and rested/ * 

About this time he fell in with the works of the 
German and other mystics — Tauler, Bohmen, George 
Fox, and William Law, and in them he found the 
same kind of help which Luther had found in Tau- 
ler : — 

u The writings of these mystics acted in no slight 
degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned 
within the outline of any single dogmatic system. 
They helped to keep alive the heart within the head ; 
gave me an indistinct yet stirring presentiment that all 
the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of 
death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in 
winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from 
some root to which I had not as yet penetrated, if they 
were to afford my soul food or shelter. If they (the 
mystics) were a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, 
yet were they a pillar of fire throughout the night, 
during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, 
and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy 
deserts of utter unbelief." 

It was in the company of these men that he first 
got clear of the trammels of the mere understanding, 
and learned that there is higher truth than that faculty 
can compass and circumscribe. The learned seemed to 
him for several generations to have walked entirely by 
the light of this mere understanding, and to have con- 
fined their investigations strictly within certain conven- 
tional limits, beyond which lay all that is most interest- 
ing and vital to man. To enthusiasts, illiterate and 
simple men of heart, they left it to penetrate towards 
the inmost centre, " the indwelling and living ground 
of all things." And then he came to this conviction, 
which he never afterwards abandoned, that if the in- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 165 

tellect will acknowledge a higher and deeper ground 
than it contains within itself, if, making itself the cen- 
tre of its system, it seeks to square all things by its 
own laws, it must, if it follows out fearlessly its own 
reasoning, land in Pantheism or in some form of blank 
unbelief. 

While his mind was seething with these thoughts it 
was that he first studied the works of Kant, and these 
he says, took hold of him as with a giant's hand. 
Henceforth his metaphysical creed was moulded mainly \jr 
by the Kantian principles. This is not the place to 
attempt to enter on the slightest exposition of these. 
But, to speak popularly, it may be said that the gist of 
Kant's system is not to make the mind out of the 
senses as Hume had done, but the senses out of the 
mind. As Locke and Hume had started from without, 
so he started from within, making the one fixed truth, 
the only ground of reality, to consist, not in that which 
the senses furnish, but in that which the understanding 
supplies to make sensible knowledge possible. His 
prime question was, How is experience possible ? And 
this possibility he found in the a 'priori forms of the 
sensory, time and space, and in the a priori forms or 
categories of the understanding, which by their activity 
bind together into one the multifarious and otherwise 
unintelligent intimations of sense. It is sense that 
supplies the understanding with the raw material ; this 
the understanding passes through its machinery, and, 
by virtue of its inherent concept-forms, reduces it to 
order, makes it conceivable and intelligible. But the 
understanding is limited in its operation to phenomena 
of experience, and whenever it steps beyond these and 
applies its categories to supersensible things, it lands 
itself in contradictions. It cannot arrive at any other 
truth than that which is valid within man's experience. 



\ 



166 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

Ultimate truths, valid for all intelligents, if such there 
be, are beyond its reach. 

Had Kant's philosophy stopped here, it would not 
have done much more for Coleridge than Locke's and 
Hartley's had done. It was because Kant asserted the 
existence in man of another power, distinct from and 
higher than understanding, namely Reason, that Cole- 
ridge found him so helpful. The term Reason Kant 
employed in another than our ordinary sense, as the 
faculty of ultimate truths or necessary principles. He 
distinguished, however, between Reason in its specula- 
tive and in its practical use. Speculative Reason he 
held to be exclusively a regulative faculty, having only 
a formal and logical use. This use is to connect our 
judgments together into conclusions, according to the 
three forms of reasoning — the categorical, the hypo- 
thetical, and the disjunctive. These three methods are 
the ideas of Speculative Reason by which it strives to 
produce unity and perfectness among the judgments of 
the understanding. As long as the ideas of Specula- 
tive Reason are thus used to control and bring into 
unity the conceptions of the discursive understanding, 
they are used rightly, and within their own legitimate 
sphere. But whenever Speculative Reason tries to 
elevate these regulative ideas into objects of theoretical 
knowledge, whenever it ascribes objective truth to 
these ideas, it leads to contradiction and falsehood. In 
other words, Speculative Reason Kant held to be true 
in its formal or logical, but false in its material applica- 
tion. As the understanding, with its categories, has for 
its object and only legitimate sphere the world of sense, 
so Speculative Reason, with its ideas, has for its exclu- 
sive sphere of operation the conceptions of the under- 
standing, and beyond this these ideas have no truth or 
validity. It was not, however, by these views, either 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 167 

of Understanding or of Speculative Reason, that Kant 
came to the help of the highest interests of humanity, 
but by his assertion of the existence in man of the 
Practical Reason which is the sufficient warrant for our 
belief in moral and supersensuous truth. Some have 
maintained this to be an afterthought added on some- 
what discordantly to the rest of Kant's system. But, 
be this as it may, Kant held that the moral law re- 
vealed itself to man as a reality through his Practical 
Reason — a law not to be gathered from experience, 
but to be received as a fundamental principle of action 
for man, evidencing itself by its own light. This 
moral law requires for its action the truth of three 
ideas, that of the soul, of immortality, and of God. 
These ideas are the postulates of the practical reason, 
and are true and certain, because, if they are denied, 
morality and free-will, man's highest certainties, become 
impossible. They are, however, to man truths of 
moral cogency — of practical faith, though Kant did 
not use this last expression, — rather than objects of 
scientific certitude. 

This distinction bejween the Undejsjtaii&is^^^ 
Reason Coleridge adopted from Kant, and made the 
grojmxLwork of all his teaching. But the distinction 
between Speculative '"and ^Practical Reason, which was 
with Kant radical, Coleridge did not dwell on, nor 
bring into prominence. He knew and so far recog- 
nized Kant's distinction, that he spoke of Speculative 
Reason as the faculty of concluding universal and nec- 
essary truths from particular and contingent appear- 
ances, and of Practical Reason as the power of pro- 
posing an ultimate end, that is, of determining the will 
by ideas. He does not, however, seem to have held 
by it firmly. Rather, he threw himself mainly on 
Kant's view of Practical Reason, and carried it out 




168 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

with a boldness which Kant would have probably dis- 
allowed. Kant's strong assertion that there was at 
least one region of his bein^ in which man comes into 
contact with supersensible truth, with the reality of 
things, this, set forth not vaguely, but with the most 
solid reasoning, was that which so attracted Coleridge. 
But in the use which Coleridge made of this power, 
and the range he assigned it, he went much beyond his 
master. He speaks of Reason as an immediate be- 
holding of supersensible things, as the eye which sees 
truths transcending sense. He identifies Reason in 
the human mind, as Kant perhaps would have done, 
with Universal Reason ; calls it impersonal ; indeed, 
regards it as a ray of the Divinity in man. In one 
place he makes it one with the light which lighteth 
every man, and in another he says that Reason is " the 
presence of the Holy Spirit to the finite understanding, 
at once the light and the inward eye." " It cannot be 
rightly called a faculty," he says, " much less a per- 
sonal property of any human mind." We cannot be 
said to possess Reason, but rather to partake of it ; for 
there is but one Reason, which is shared by all intelli- 
gent beings, and is in itself the universal or Supreme 
Reason. " He in whom Reason dwells can as little 
appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim 
ownership in the breathing air, or make an inclosure 
in the cope of heaven." Again, he says of Reason, 
that " it has been said to be more like to sense than to 
understanding ; but in this it differs from sense : the 
bodily senses have objects differing from themselves ; 
Reason, the organ of spiritual apprehension, has ob- 
jects consubstantial with itself, being itself its own 
object, — that is, self-contemplative." And, again, 
" Reason substantiated and vital, one only, yet mani- 
fold, overseeing all, and going through all understanding, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 169 

without being either the sense, the understanding, or 
the imagination, contains all three within itself, even 
as the mind contains its own thoughts, and is present 
in and through them all ; or as the expression pervades 
the different features of an intelligent countenance." 

In much of the above, Coleridge has not only gone 
beyond Kant's cautious handling of Practical Reason, 
but has given to the German's philosophical language a 
religious, and even a Biblical, coloring of his own. 
Nay, in regarding Reason as the power of intuitive 
insight into moral and spiritual truths, he has ap- 
proached nearer to some of the German philosophers 
who came after Kant. Though Coleridge made so 
much of this distinction between Reason and Under- 
standing, and of Reason as the organ of spiritual truth, 
and though throughout his later works he is continually 
insisting on it as a fundamental principle, yet he cannot 
be said to have made it secure against the objections of 
assailants. 

It is a theory to account for certain great facts of 
mental experience, and like every theory it must be 
tested by its fitness to explain the facts, and to solve 
the chief difficulties they present. The facts are these. 
Amid the objects of thought we find a large number of 
which we can form distinct, well-rounded conceptions, 
and from these conceptions so formed, we can deduce 
accurate trains of reasoning. Another portion of the 
things which occupy our thoughts are of such a nature 
that, if truths at all, they are transcendent truths. Ihe 
best conceptions we can form of them we feel to be 
defective and inadequate, not presenting to us the idea 
as it truly is, but only hinting it through " feeble anal- 
ogies and approximations." Such objects of thought, 
it is often said, we apprehend, but cannot comprehend. 
To this latter category belong the fundamental truths 



170 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

of morals and religion, those primal faiths on which 
man's spiritual nature rests. But the logical faculty 
ever tends, if left to itself, to ignore or even deny the 
reality of this whole order of truths, because they can- 
not be reduced to that clear-cut precision after which 
this faculty ever strives. And philosophers, whose 
vocation it is to exercise this faculty, and in all subjects 
to seek for reasoned truth, are prone to become the 
victims of the instrument which they use, and to deny 
the existence, for us at least, of whatever cannot be 
shaped into clear conceptions, and made fast in the grip 
of conclusive logic. They ever tend to circumscribe 
the orb of belief, and to narrow it within exactly the 
same limits as the orb of logical conception. If this 
tendency had full way, what place would be found for 
all the higher side of man's being, for those truths by 
which the spirit lives, those primal truths which, though 
transcendent, and hard to grasp, — 

" Are yet the master light of all our seeing? n 

It was to vindicate the validity of these truths, and to 
show that though man's thought cannot fully compass 
them, they are not less real, and far more vital, than 
the conclusions of the most irrefragable logic, that 
Coleridge insisted so earnestly on his doctrine of the 
distinction between Reason and Understanding. 

That in making this distinction he was striving to 
utter a deep spiritual truth, which lies at the bottom of 
all human thought, I fully believe. But whether he 
has succeeded in uttering it in the best, most unassail- 
able shape, may well be made a question. It is not 
easy to meet the old challenge, " Name a certain num- 
ber of propositions which are products to the Reason, 
and as many more which belong to the Understanding, 
that we may compare the two sets, and learn to ap- 






SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 171 

predate the distinction." Since all truths, from what- 
ever source they come, must, before they can be re- 
duced to definite conceptions, and expressed in proposi- 
tions, first have passed through the moulds of the 
understanding, it seems hardly possible, to produce a 
single truth, unless it be the law of contradiction, and 
the other necessary laws of formal logic, which is the 
pure mint of the reason, unalloyed by contact with the 
understanding. A close examination would, I believe, 
show that what Coleridge called truths of the reason 
are mainly those moral and spiritual faiths, the posses- 
sion of which makes man a moral being. Though they 
are born undoubtedly in another region than the under- 
standing, yet before they can become distinct objects 
of reflection, they must have been shaped by intellectual 
moulds, and expressed in linguistic terms, which, as 
regards the truths themselves, are but poor and in- 
adequate accommodations. Coleridge recognized the 
necessity of this process, but maintained that it was to 
him no argument against a truth of reason, if, after 
passing through the logical process, it issued in proposi- 
tions which seem illogical and contradictory. To this, 
one of the uninitiated might naturally reply, " It may 
be so ; but if your truths of the reason when attempted 
to be logically expressed issue in contradictions, by 
what test am I to distinguish such a truth of reason 
from absolute nonsense ? " A satisfactory reply to such 
a querist I do not know that Coleridge has ever fur- 
nished. On the whole, it would seem that Reason, as 
he used it, is but another and perhaps not better name 
for what, in vague popular phrase, is known as man's 
moral and spiritual nature. His truths of Reason are 
that which is essential and primitive in this nature, — 
those elemental truths, which we cannot adequately 
grasp, but on which we are in the last resort constrained 



172 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

to fall back, as the ultimate ground of all belief — 
indeed, as the very substratum of our being. If to 
vindicate fully this transcendent side of being, to show 
how it is cogitable, and in harmony with logical thought 
and with all other truth, if this be the great aim of 
philosophy, it cannot be said that Coleridge has fully 
accomplished it. On the other hand, at a time when 
philosophy had almost forgotten the problem, and dis- 
carded the higher truths as mere fanatical chimeras, to 
have brought the question once more into court, to 
have reasserted the reality and the preeminence of 
the spiritual verities, to have pressed for their admit- 
tance into and reconciliation with men's ordinary ways 
of thinking ; this was good service, and this service 
Coleridge did. 

A good example of the way in which Coleridge ap- 
plied his metaphysical principles to philosophic ques- 
tions will be found in the Essays on Method, in the 
third volume of " The Friend." He there attempts to 
reconcile Plato's view of the Idea as lying at the 
ground of all investigation with Bacon's philosophy of 
induction, and to prove that, though they worked from 
opposite ends of the problem, they are not really op- 
posed. In all inductive investigations, Coleridge con- 
tends, the mind must contribute something, the mental 
initiative, the prudens qucestio, the idea ; and this, when 
tested or proved by rigorous scientific processes, is 
found to be a law of nature. What in the mind of the 
discoverer is a prophetic idea, is found in nature to be 
a law, and the one answers, and is akin to the other. 
What Coleridge has there said of the mental initiative 
which lies at the foundation of induction, Dr. Whewell 
has taken up and argued out at length in his works on 
Induction. Mr. Mill has as stoutly redargued it from 
his own point of view, and their polemic still waits a 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 173 

solution. But I must pass from these pure metaphysi- 
cal questions to notice some of the ways in which Cole- 
ridge applied his principles to moral and religious ques- 
tions. 

In the " Literary Remains " there is a remarkable 
essay on Faith, which contains a suggestive application 
of these principles. Faith he demies to be fealty or 
fidelity to that part of our being which cannot become 
an object of the senses ; to that in us which is highest, 
and is alone unconditionally imperative. What is 
this ? Every man is conscious of something within 
him which tells him he ought, which commands him, to 
do to others as he would they should do to him. Of 
this he is as assured as he is that he sees and hears ; 
only with this difference, that the senses act independ- 
ently of the will ; whereas, the conscience is essen- 
tially connected with the will. We can, if we will, 
refuse to listen to it. The listening or the not listen- 
ing to conscience is the first moral act by which a man 
takes upon him or refuses allegiance to a power higher 
than himself, yet speaking within himself. Now, what 
is this in each man, higher than himself, yet speaking 
within him ? It is Reason, supersensuous, impersonal, 
the representative in man of the will of God ; and de- 
manding the allegiance of the individual will. Faith 
then is fealty to this rightful superior ; " allegiance of 
the moral nature to Universal Reason, or the will of 
God ; in opposition to all usurpation whether of appe- 
tite, or of sensible objects, or of the finite understand- 
ing," or of affection to others, be it even the purest 
love of the creature. And conscience is the inward 
witness to the presence in us of the divine ray of rea- 
son, " which is the irradiative power, the representative 
of the Infinite." An approving conscience is the sense 
of harmony of the personal will of man with that im- 



174 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

personal light which is in him, representative of the 
will of God. A condemning conscience is the sense 
of discord or contrariety between these two. Faith, 
then, consists in the union and interpenetration of the 
Reason and the individual will. Since our will and 
moral nature enter into it, faith must be a continuous 
and total energy of the whole man. Since Reason 
enters into it, faith must be a light — a seeing, a be- 
holding of truth. Hence faith is a spiritual act of the 
whole being ; it is " the source and germ of the fidelity 
of man to God, by the entire subjugation of the human 
will to Reason, as the representative in Him of the 
divine will." Such is a condensation, nearly in Cole- 
ridge's own words, of the substance of that essay. 
Hard words and repulsive these may seem to some, 
who feel it painful to analyze the faith they live by. 
And no doubt the simple childlike apprehension of the 
things of faith is better and more blessed than all phi- 
losophizing about them. They who have good health 
and light breathing, whose system is so sound that they 
know not they have a system, have little turn for dis- 
quisitions on health and respiration. But, just as sick- 
ness and disease have compelled men to study the 
bodily framework, so doubt and mental entanglement 
have forced men to go into these abstruse questions in 
order to meet the philosophy of denial with a counter 
philosophy of faith. The philosophy is not faith, but 
it may help to clear away sophistications that stand in 
the way of it. 

For entering into speculations of this kind, Cole- 
ridge has been branded as a transcendentalist, — a 
word with many of hideous import. But abstruse and 
wide of practice as these speculations may seem, it was 
for practical behoof mainly that Coleridge undertook 
them. " What are my metaphysics ? " he exclaims ; 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 175 

" merely the referring of the mind to its own conscious- 
ness for truths which are indispensable to its own hap- 
piness." Of this any one may be convinced who shall 
read with care his " Friend " or his " Lay Sermons." 
One great source of the difficulty, or, as some might 
call it, the confusedness of these works, is the rush and 
throng of human interests with which they are filled. 
If he discusses the ideas of Reason, or any other like 
abstract subject, it is because he feels its vital bearing 
on some truth of politics, morality, or religion, the 
clear understanding of which concerns the common 
weal. And here is one of his strongest mental pecul- 
iarities, which has made many censure him as unintel- 
ligible. His eye flashed with a lightning glance from 
most abstract truth to the minutest practical detail, and 
back again from this to the abstract principle. This 
makes that, when once his mental powers begin to 
work, their movements are on a vastness of scale, and 
with a many-sidedness of view, which, if they render 
him hard to follow, make him also stimulative and sug- 
gestive of thought beyond all other modern writers. 

When Coleridge first began to speculate, the sover- 
eignty of Locke and his followers in English Metaphys- 
ics was not more supreme than that of Paley in Moral 
Philosophy. Both were Englishmen of the round ro- 
bust English stamp, haters of subtleties, abhorrent of 
idealism, resolute to warn off any ghost of scholasticism 
from the domain of common-sense philosophy. And 
yet both had to lay down dogmatic decisions on sub- 
jects into which, despite the burliest common sense, 
things infinite and spiritual will intrude. How resolute 
was Coleridge's polemic against Locke and all his 
school, we have seen. Not less vigorous was his pro- 
test against Paley as a moralist, and that at a time 
when few voices were raised against the common-sense 
Dean. 



176 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

For completely rounded moral systems Coleridge 
indeed professed little respect, ranking them for utility 
with systems of casuistry or auricular confession. But 
of vital principles of morality, penetrating to the quick, 
few men's writings are more fruitful. A standing 
butt for Coleridge's shafts was Paley's well-known 
definition of virtue as " the doing of good to mankind, 
in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of 
everlasting happiness." Or, as Paley has elsewhere 
more broadly laid down the same principle, " we are 
obliged to do nothing, but what we ourselves are to 
gain or lose something by, for nothing else can be a 
violent motive." Against this substitution, as he called 
it, of a scheme of selfish prudence for moral virtue, 
Coleridge was never weary of raising his voice. Mo- 
rality, as he contended, arises out of the Reason and 
Conscience of man ; prudence out of the Understand- 
ing, and the natural wants and desires of the individ- 
ual ; and though prudence is the worthy servant of 
morality, trhe master and the servant must not be con- 
founded. The chapter in " The Friend," in which 
he argues against the Utilitarian system of ethics, and 
proves that general consequences cannot be the crite- 
rion of the right and wrong of particular actions, is 
one of the best reasoned and most valuable which that 
work contains. The following are some of the argu- 
ments with which he contends against " the inadequacy 
of the principle of general consequences as a criterion 
of right and wrong, and its utter uselessness as a moral 
guide." Such a criterion is vague and illusory, for 
it depends on each man's notion of happiness, and no 
two men have exactly the same notion. And even 
if men were agreed as to what constitutes the end, 
namely, happiness, the power of calculating conse- 
quences, and the foresight needed to secure the means 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Ill 

to the end, are just that in which men most differ. 
But morality ought to be grounded on that part of 
their nature, namely, their moral convictions, in which 
men are most alike, not on the calculating understand- 
ing, in which they most differ. Again, such a criterion 
confounds morality, which looks to the inward motive, 
with law, which regards only the outward act. Indeed, 
the need of a judgment of actions according to the 
inward motive, forms one of the strongest arguments 
for a future state. For in this world our outward 
actions, apart from their motives, must needs deter- 
mine our temporal welfare. But the moral nature 
longs for, and Scripture reveals, a more perfect judg- 
ment to come, wherein not the outward act but the 
inward principle, the thoughts and intents of the heart, 
shall be made the ground of judgment. Again, this 
criterion is illusory, because evil actions are often 
turned to good by that Providence which brings good 
out of evil. If, then, consequences were the sole or 
chief criterion, then these evil actions ought to be, 
because of their results, reckoned good. Nero perse- 
cuted the Christians, and so spread Christianity : is he 
to be credited with this good result? Again, to form 
a notion of the nature of an action multiplied indefi- 
nitely into the future, we must first know the nature 
of the original action itself. And if we already know 
this, what need of testing it by its remote consequences ? 
If against these arguments it were urged that general 
consequences are the criterion, not of the agent but of 
the action, Coleridge would reply that all actions have 
their whole worth and main value from the moral 
principle which actuates the agent. So that if it could 
be shown that two men, one acting from enlightened 
self-love, the other from pure Christian principle, would 
observe towards all their neighbors throughout life 
12 



178 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

exactly the same course of outward conduct, yet these 
two, measured by a true moral standard, would stand 
wide apart in worth. By these and such like argu- 
ments Coleridge opposes the Paleyan and every other 
form of Utilitarian ethics. Instead of confounding 
morality with prudence, he everywhere bases morality 
on religion. " The widest maxims of prudence," he 
asserts, u are arms without hearts, when disjoined from 
those feelings which have their fountain in a living 
principle." That principle lies in the common ground 
where morality and religion meet, and from which 
neither can be sundered without destruction to both. 
The moral law, every man feels, has a universality 
and an imperativeness far transcending the widest 
maxims of experience ; and this because it has its 
origin in Reason, as described above, in that in each 
man which is representative of the Divine Will, and 
connects him therewith. Out of Reason, not from 
experience, all pure principles of morality spring, and 
in it they find their sanction. This is a truth which 
Coleridge reiterated in every variety of form. 

But while he is thus strong in placing the founda- 
tion of individual morality in Reason, in his sense of 
that word, he repudiates those theories which would 
draw from the same source the first principles of polit- 
ical government. In opposition to these theories, he 
held that each form of government is sufficiently jus- 
tified, when it can be shown that it is suitable to the 
circumstances of the particular nation. Therefore no 
one form of government can lay claim to be the sole 
rightful one. Thus to prudence or expediency Cole- 
ridge assigns a place in political questions which he 
denies to it in moral ones. Full of power is his whole 
argument against Rousseau, Paine, and others of that 
day, who maintained the social contract and the rights 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 179 

of man, and, laying the grounds of political right ex- 
clusively in Reason, held that nothing was rightful 
in civil society which could not be deduced from the 
primary laws of reason. " Who," asked Rousseau, 
" shall dare prescribe a law of moral action for any 
rational being, considered as a member of a state, 
which does not flow immediately froni that reason 
which is the fountain of all morality ? " Whereto 
Coleridge replies, Morality looks not to the outward 
act, but to the internal maxim of actions. But politics 
look solely to the outward act. The end of good gov- 
ernment is so to regulate the actions of particular 
bodies of men, as shall be most expedient under given 
circumstances. How then can the same principle be 
employed to test the expediency of political rules and 
the purity of inward motives? He then goes on to 
show that, when Rousseau asserted that every human 
being possessed of Reason had in him an inalienable 
sovereignty, he applied to actual man — compassed 
about with passions, errors, vices, and infirmities — what 
is true of the abstract Reason alone; that all he as- 
serted of " that sovereign will, to which the right of 
legislation belongs, applies to no human being, to no 
assemblage of human beings, least of all to the mixed 
multitude that makes up the people ; but entirely and 
exclusively to Reason itself, which, it is true, dwells 
in every man potentially, but actually and in perfect 
purity in no man, and in no body of men." And this 
reasoning he clinches by an instance and an argument, 
often since repeated, though we know not whether 
Coleridge was the first to employ it. He shows that 
the constituent assembly of France, whenever they 
tried to act out these principles of pure Reason, were 
forced to contravene them. They excluded from po- 
litical power children, though reasonable beings, be- 



180 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

cause in them Reason is imperfect; women, because 
they are dependent. But is there not more of Reason 
in many women, and even in some children, than in 
men dependent for livelihood on the will of others, the 
very poor, the infirm of mind, the ignorant, the de- 
praved ? Some reasonable beings must be disfran- 
chised. It comes then to a question of degrees. And 
how are degrees to be determined? Not by pure rea- 
son, but by rules of expedience, founded on present 
observation and past experience. But the whole of 
Coleridge's reasoning against Rousseau and Cart- 
wright's universal suffrage is well worth the attention 
of those advanced thinkers of the present day, who 
are beginning once again, after a lapse of nearly a 
century, to argue about political rights on grounds of 
abstract reason. They will there find, if they care to 
see it, the whole question placed not on temporary ar- 
guments, but on permanent principles. 

But keen as was Coleridge's interest in political and 
moral subjects, the full bent of his soul, and its deep- 
est meditations, were given to the truths of the Chris- 
tian revelation, as bearing most profoundly on the well- 
being of man. From none of his works are these 
thoughts absent ; but the fullest exposition of his relig- 
ious views is to be found in the " Aids to Reflection," 
his maturest work, and in the third and fourth volumes 
of the " Literary Remains." Before, however, advert- 
ing to these opinions, it may be well to remember, that, 
much as Coleridge thought and reasoned on religion, it 
was his firm conviction, founded on experience, that the 
way to an assured faith, that faith which gives life and 
peace, is not to be won by dint of argument. " Evidences 
of Christianity ! " he exclaims, " I am weary of the word. 
Make a man feel the want of it ; rouse him, if you 
can, to the self-knowledge of the need of it, and you 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 181 

may safely trust it to its own evidence, remembering 
always the express declaration of Christ himself : i No 
man cometh to me, unless the Father leadeth him."' 
So it was with himself. Much as he philosophized, 
philosophy was not his soul's haven ; not thence did 
his help come. It may have cleared away outlying 
hindrances, but it was not this that led him up to the 
stronghold of hope. Through the wound made in his 
own spirit, through the brokenness of a heart humbled 
and made contrite by the experience of his own sin and 
utter helplessness, entered in the faith which gave rest, 
the peace which " settles where the intellect is meek." 
Once his soul had reached the cidatel, his ever busy 
eye and penetrating spirit surveyed the nature of the 
bulwarks, and examined the foundations, as few before 
had done. And the world has the benefit, whatever it 
may be, of these surveys. But though Coleridge was 
a religious philosopher, he discriminated clearly be- 
tween the philosophy and the religion. He knew well, 
and often insisted, that religion is life rather than 
science, and that there is a danger, peculiar to the in- 
tellectual man, of turning into speculation what was 
given to live by. He knew that the intellect, busy 
with ideas about God, may not only fail to bring a 
man nearer the divine life, but may actually tend to 
withdraw him from it. For the intellect takes in but the 
image of the truth, and leaves the vital impression, the 
full power of it, unappropriated. And hence it comes 
that those truths which, if felt by the unlearned at all, 
go straight to the heart and are taken in by the whole 
man, are apt, in the case of the philosopher and the 
theologian, to stop at the vestibule of the understand- 
ing, and never to get further. This is a danger pecul- 
iar to the learned, or to those who think themselves 
such. The trained intellect is apt to eat out the child's 



182 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

heart, and yet the " except ye become as little chil- 
dren " stands unrepealed. Coleridge knew this well. 
In his earliest interview with De Quincey, he said, 
" that prayer with the whole soul is the highest energy 
of which the human heart is capable, and that the 
great mass of worldly men, and of learned men, are 
absolutely incapable of prayer." And only two years 
before his death, after a retrospect of his own life, to 
his nephew, who sat by his bedside one afternoon, he 
said, "I have no difficulty in forgiveness. . . . Neither 
do I find or reckon the most solemn faith in God as a 
real object the most arduous act of reason and will. 
O no ! it is to pray, to pray as God would have us : 
that is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. 
Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, 
with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that 
God will listen to your voice through Christ, and ver- 
ily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon — this is the 
last, the greatest achievement of a Christian's warfare 
on earth." " And then he burst into tears, and 
begged me to pray for him." 

It has been said that the great object of his theo- 
logical speculations was to bring into harmony religion 
and philosophy. This assertion would mislead if it 
were meant to imply that he regarded these as two co- 
ordinate powers, which could be welded together into 
one reasoned system. It would perhaps be more true 
to say that his endeavor was, in his own words, to re- 
move the doubts and difficulties that cannot but arise 
whenever the understanding, the mind of the flesh, is 
made the measure of spiritual things. He labored to 
remove religion from a merely mechanical or intellect- 
ual, and to place it on a moral and spiritual foundation. 
His real aim was, notwithstanding that his love for 
scholastic distinctions might seem to imply the con- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 183 

trary, to simplify men's thoughts on these things, to 
show that spiritual truth is, like the light, self-evidenc- 
ing, that it is pre conformed to man's higher nature, as 
man's nature is preconformed to it. 

As he had to contend against Lockeian metaphysics 
and Paleyan ethics, so he had to do strenuous battle 
against a theology mainly mechanical. He awoke 
upon an age when the belief in God was enforced in 
the schools as the conclusion of a lengthened argu- 
ment ; when revelation was proved exclusively by mir- 
acles, with little regard to its intrinsic evidence ; and 
when both natural and revealed truths were superin- 
duced from without, as extraneous, extra-moral beliefs, 
rather than taught as living faiths evidenced from 
within. In opposition to this kind of teaching, which 
had so long reigned, Coleridge taught that the founda- 
tion truth of all religion, faith in the existence of God, 
was incapable of intellectual demonstration — that as 
all religion, so this corner-stone of religion, must have 
a moral origin. To him that belief was inherent in 
the soul, as Reason is inherent, indeed a part of Rea- 
son, in the sense he gave to that word, as moral in its 
nature, and the fountain of moral truth. His creed on 
this subject he thus expresses: — 

" Because I possess Reason, or a law of right and 
wrong, which, uniting with the sense of moral respon- 
sibility, constitutes my conscience, hence it is my abso- 
lute duty to believe, and I do believe, that there is a 
God, that is, a Being in whom supreme Reason and a 
most holy will are one with infinite power ; and that 
all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and 
therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by his 
omnipotence. The wonderful works of God in the 
sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me 
of his existence, and a shadowing out to me his per- 



184 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

fections. But as all language presupposes, in the in- 
telligent hearer or reader, those primary notions which 
it symbolizes, .... even so, I believe that the notion 
of God is essential to the human mind ; that it is called 
forth into distinct consciousness principally by the con- 
science, and auxiliarily by the manifest adaptation of 
means to ends in the outward creation. It is therefore 
evident to my Reason, that the existence of God is ab- 
solutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific 
demonstration, and that Scripture so represents it. 
For it commands us to believe in one God. Now all 
commandment necessarily relates to the will ; whereas 
all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, 
and is demonstrative only in so far as it is compulsory 
on the mind, volentem, nolentem" 

Thus we see that with regard to the first truth of all 
religion, Coleridge places its evidence in conscience and 
the intuitive reason. Carrying the same manner of 
thinking into revealed religion, he gave to its inherent 
substance the foremost place as evidence, while to 
historical proofs and arguments from miracles he as- 
signed the same subordinate place as, in reference to 
the existence of God, he assigned to arguments from 
design. 

His view upon this subject also is better given in his 
own language. It could hardly be expressed in fewer, 
and certainly not in better words. The main evidence, 
he thinks, are " the doctrines of Christainity, and the 
correspondence of human nature to these doctrines, 
illustrated, first, historically, as the production of a new 
world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet 
upon it; second, individually, from its appeal to an 
ascertained fact, the truth of which every man possess- 
ing Reason has an equal power of ascertaining within 
himself; namely, a will, which has more or less lost its 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 185 

own freedom, though not the consciousness that it 
ought to be and may become free ; the conviction that 
this cannot be achieved without the operation of a prin- 
ciple co-natural with itself; the experience in his own 
nature of the truth of the process described by Scrip- 
ture, as far as he can place himself within the process, 
aided by the confident assurances of others as to the 
effects experienced by them, and which he is striving to 
arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. To 
such a man one main test of the truth is his faith in its 
accompaniment by a growing insight into the moral 
beauty and necessity of the process which it comprises, 
and the dependence of that process on the causes as- 
serted. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight 
which changes faith into knowledge, will be the reward 
of that belief." 

Subordinate to the internal evidence in Coleridge's 
view — buttresses, but not corner-stones — are the 
facts of the existence and of the history of Christianity, 
and also of the miracles which accompanied its first 
appearance. These are necessary results, rather than 
primary proofs of revelation. " As the result of the 
above convictions, he will not scruple to receive the 
particular miracles recorded, inasmuch as it is mirac- 
ulous that an incarnate God should not work what 
must to mere men appear as miracles ; inasmuch as it 
is strictly accordant with the ends and benevolent 
nature of such a Being to commence the elevation of 
man above his mere senses by enforcing attention first, 
through an appeal to those senses." Thus, according 
to him, miracles are not the adequate and ultimate 
proof of religion, not the keystone of the arch, but 
rather " compacting stones in it, which give while they 
receive strength." 

It thus appears that Coleridge's theology was more 



186 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

or less a recoil from one in which miracles had been 
pushed into undue, almost exclusive, prominence, one 
in which the proof of religion was derived mainly from 
the outward senses. In accordance with his pre- 
eminently subjective mode of thought, he was convinced 
that to subjugate the senses to faith, the passive belief 
to the moral and responsible belief, was one main end 
of all religion. Whether Coleridge struck the balance 
rightly between outward and inward evidence, whether 
he gave to miracles that place which is their due ; 
whether, in his zeal for the inward truths, he estimated 
as they deserve the miraculous facts which, whatever 
they may be to some over-subtilized intellects, have 
been, and always must be, to the great mass of men, 
the main objective basis on which the spiritual truths 
repose, — these are questions on which I shall not now 
enter. My aim here is not so much to criticise, as to 
set forth, as fairly as may be, what his views really 
were. 

We have seen then that Coleridge held the adapta- 
tion of Christianity to man's need, and to his whole 
moral nature, to be the strongest evidence of its truth. 
And this naturally suggests the question, How far did 
he regard man's moral convictions to be the test of 
revelation as a whole, or of any particular doctrine of 
revelation ? Did he wish to square down the truths 
of revelation to the findings of human conscience ? To 
answer this question is the more necessary, because 
Mr. Mill, in the few remarks on Coleridge's religious 
opinions with which he closes his essay, has asserted 
that he " goes as far as the Unitarians in making man's 
reason and moral feelings a test of revelation ; but 
differs toto ccelo from them in their rejection of its mys- 
teries, which he regards as the highest philosophical 
truths." It would be strange, indeed, if Coleridge, who 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 187 

certainly ought to have known both his own views and 
those of the Unitarians, should have so far deluded 
himself as to protest against them unweariedly for this 
very fault, that they made man the measure of all 
things, while in this matter he himself was substantially 
at one with them. The truth is, that those who speak 
most strongly about Reason being the measure of faith, 
mean by the word Reason much the same as Coleridge 
meant by Understanding — the faculty of definite con- 
ceptions, the power of clearly comprehending truths. 
And in their mouths the proposition means that nothing 
is to be believed in religion, or in anything else, which 
man's understanding cannot fully grasp, clearly con- 
ceive, definitely express, satisfactorily explain. Now 
Coleridge used the term Reason in a sense different 
from this, nay opposed to it. He held, whether rightly 
or no I do not now inquire, but he held that there is a 
power in man to apprehend spiritual truths which he 
cannot comprehend, — something that brings him into 
close relation, I had almost said contact, with super- 
sensible reality, — and to this power he gave the name 
of Reason. And the intimations of moral and spiritual 
things, which he believed that he received through this 
power, he accepted readily, though he could not under- 
stand nor explain them. Even with regard to the 
first truth of religion, the existence, personality, and 
moral nature of God, he held that this is to be received 
on moral grounds, and regarded as a settled truth " not 
by the removal of all difficulties, or by any such in- 
crease of insight as enables a man to meet all skeptical 
objections with a full and precise answer ; but because 
he has convinced himself that it is folly as well as pre- 
sumption to expect it ; and because the doubts and 
difficulties disappear at the beam when tried against the 
weight of the reasons in the other scale." Again, of 



188 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

the fall of man, he says that it is a mystery too pro- 
found for human insight ; and of the doctrine of the 
Trinity, that it is an absolute truth transcending our 
human means of understanding or demonstrating it. 
These, and numerous other such like sayings, might be 
adduced, not to speak of the whole scope of his philos- 
ophy, to show that it was no obstacle to his belief in 
the truth, that it transcended his comprehension. Nay, 
more, so far was he from desiring to bring down all 
religious truths to the level of human comprehension, 
that he everywhere. enforced it as a thing antecedently 
to be expected, that the fundamental truths should be 
mysteries, and declared that he would have found it 
hard to believe them if they had not been so. 

What then did he mean when he maintained, as 
he certainly did, that " in no case can true Reason 
and a right faith oppose each other ? " We have seen 
that Reason with Coleridge was the link by which man 
is joined on to a higher order, the source whence he 
draws in all of moral truth and of religious sentiment 
which he possesses. It was the harmony of revelation 
with this faculty of apprehending universal spiritual 
truths which was to him the main ground for originally 
believing in revelation, and therefore he held that no 
particular doctrine of revelation can contradict the find- 
ings of that faculty on the evidence of which revela- 
tion as a whole is originally received. In other words, 
no view of God's nature and of his dealings with men, 
no interpretation of any doctrine, or of any text of 
Scripture, can be true, which contradicts the clear 
intimations of enlightened conscience. And the sub- 
stance of revelation and the dictates of conscience so 
answer to each other, that the religious student, under 
the guidance of the Divine Spirit, may expect to gain 
an ever-growing insight into their harmony. Opposed 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 189 

to this doctrine of Coleridge, on the one hand, is the 
teaching of those who, believing in revelation, deny 
to man any power of apprehending spiritual truths, 
and hold that the first truths of religion must be re- 
ceived simply as authoritative data from without. 
Equally opposed, on the other hand, are the views of 
those who, though admitting in some sense the truth 
of revelation, yet make man's power of understanding 
the entire measure of all that is to be received as 
revealed. The creed which is bounded either theoret- 
ically or practically within this latter limit must needs 
be a scanty one. 

The truth seems to be that, both in the things of 
natural and revealed religion, the test that lies in man's 
moral judgment seems more a negative than a positive 
one. We are not to believe about God anything 
which positively contradicts our first notions of right- 
eousness and goodness, for to do so would be to cut 
away the original moral ground of our belief in his 
existence and character. Thus far our moral judg- 
ments carry us, but not much further. No rational 
man who believes in God at all will try to square all 
the facts that meet him in the natural and the moral 
world to his sense of right and wrong. Life is full of 
inscrutable facts which cannot be made by us to fit into 
any moral standard of ours. All that the moral judg- 
ment has a right to say with regard to them is to 
refuse to believe any proposed interpretation of them 
which contradicts the plain laws of right and wrong, 
any interpretation which makes God unrighteous on 
account of such facts, and to wait patiently in full faith 
that a time will come when we shall see these now 
inexplicable facts to have been fully consistent with 
the most perfect righteousness. And the same use 
which we make of our moral judgment in regard to 



190 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

the facts that meet us in life, we are bound to make 
of it with regard to the doctrines of revelation. We 
may not be able now to see moral light through all of 
these, but we are to refuse any interpretation of them 
which does violence to the moral judgment. In both 
cases, however, we have reason to expect that, to those 
who honestly and humbly use the light they have, 
more light will be given, — a growing insight into, or 
at least a trustful acquiescence in, facts which at first 
were too dark and perplexing. There are in this 
region two extremes, equally to be shunned. One is 
theirs, who in matters of religion begin by discredit- 
ing the natural light, — by putting out the eye of 
conscience, — that they may the more magnify the 
heavenly light of revelation, or rather their own inter- 
pretations thereof. The other is seen in those who, 
enthroning on the judgment-seat the first off-hand 
findings of their own, and that perhaps no very en- 
lightened conscience, proceed to arraign before this 
bar the statements of Scripture, and to reject all which 
does not seem to square with the verdicts of the self- 
erected tribunal. There is a more excellent way than 
either, a way not definable perhaps by criticism, but to 
be found by spiritual wisdom. There are those who, 
loath to do violence to the teachings either of Scripture 
or of conscience, but patiently and reverently compar- 
ing them together, find that the more deeply they are 
pondered, the more they do, on the whole, reflect light 
one on the other. To such the words of Scripture, 
interpreted by the experience of life, reveal things 
about their own nature which once seemed incredible. 
And the more they know of themselves and their own 
needs, the more the words of Scripture seem to enlarge 
their meaning to meet these. But as to the large 
outlying region of the inexplicable that will still remain 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 191 

in the world, in man, and in Holy Writ, they can leave 
all this, in full confidence that when the solution, soon 
or late, shall come, it will be seen to be in profound 
harmony with our highest sense of righteousness, and 
with that word which declares that " God is light, and 
in him is no darkness at all." Such, though not ex- 
pressed in Coleridge's words, I believe to be the spirit 
of his teaching. 

What then is to be said of those passages in his 
works in which he speaks of the mysteries of faith and 
the highest truths of philosophy as coincident ; in which 
he says that he received the doctrine of the Logos not 
merely on authority, but because of its to him exceed- 
ing reasonableness ; in which he speaks as if he had an 
intellectual insight into the doctrine of the Trinity, and 
draws out formulas of it in strange words hard to un- 
derstand ? Whatever we may think of these sayings 
and formulas, it is to be remembered that Coleridge 
never pretended that he could have discovered the 
truths apart from revelation. If after practically ac- 
cepting these truths, and finding in them the spiritual 
supports of his soul, he employed his powers of thought 
upon them, and drew them out into intellectual form- 
ulas more satisfactory to himself than they have for the 
most part proved to others, yet these philosophizings, 
made for the purpose of speculative insight, he neither 
represented as the grounds of his own faith, never ob- 
truded on others as necessary for theirs. He ever kept 
steadily before him the difference between an intellect- 
ual belief and a practical faith, and asserted that it was 
solely in consequence of the historical fact of redemp- 
tion that the Trinity becomes a doctrine, the belief in 
which as real is commanded by our conscience. 

In the " Aids to Reflection," the earlier half of the 
work is employed in clearing away preliminary hin- 



192 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

drances ; the latter part deals mainly with moral diffi- 
culties that are apt to beset the belief in the Original 
Sin and in the Atonement. 

With regard to the former doctrine, he shows that 
the belief of the existence of evil, as a fact, in man and 
in the world, is not peculiar to Christianity, but is com- 
mon to it with every religion and every philosophy 
that has believed in a personal God ; in fact, to all sys- 
tems but Pantheism and Atheism. The fact then 
needs no proof, but the meaning of the fact does. As 
to this, Coleridge rejected that interpretation of origi- 
nal sin, which makes u original " mean " hereditary," or 
inherited like our bodily constitution from our fore- 
fathers. Such, he held, might be disease or calamity, 
but could not be sin, the meaning of which is, the 
choice of evil by a will free to choose between good 
and evil. This fact of a law in man's nature which 
opposes the law of God, is not only a fact, but a mys- 
tery, of which no other solution than the statement of 
the fact is possible. For consider : Sin, to be sin, is 
evil originating in, not outside of, the will. And what 
is the essence of the will ? It is a self-determining 
power, having the original ground of its own determi- 
nation in itself; and if subject to any cause from with- 
out, such cause must have acquired this power of deter- 
mining the will, by a previous determination of the will 
itself. This is the very essence of a will. And herein 
it is contradistinguished from nature, whose essence it 
is to be unable to originate anything, but to be bound 
in the mechanism of cause and effect. If the will has 
by its own act subjected itself to nature, has received 
into itself from nature an alien influence which has cur- 
tailed its freedom, in so far as it has done this, it has 
corrupted itself. This is original sin, or sin originating 
in the only region in which it can originate — the 
Will. This is a fall of man. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 193 

You ask, When did this fall take place ? Has the 
will of each man chosen evil for itself; and, if so, 
when ? To this Coleridge would reply that each indi- 
vidual will has so chosen ; but as to the when, the will 
belongs to a region of being, is part of an order of 
things in which time and space have no meaning ; that 
" the subject stands in no relation to time, can neither 
be called in time or out of time ; but that all relations 
of time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question 
as north or south, round or square, thick or thin, are in 
the affections." 

Again you ask, With whom did sin originate ? And 
Coleridge replies, The grounds of will on which it is 
true of any one man are equally true in the case of all 
men. The fact is asserted of the individual, not be- 
cause he has done this or that particular evil act, but 
simply because he is man. It is impossible for the in- 
dividual to say that it commenced in this or that act. 
at this or that time. As he cannot trace it back to 
any particular moment of his life, neither can he state 
any moment at which it did not exist. As to this fact, 
then, what is true of any one man is true of all men. 
For, " in respect of original sin, each man is the repre- 
sentative of all men." 

Such, nearly in his own words, was the way in 
which Coleridge sought, while fully acknowledging this 
fact, to construe it to himself, so as to get rid of those 
theories which make it an infliction from without, a 
calamity, a hereditary disease; for which, however 
much sorrow there might be, there could be no respon- 
sibility, and therefore no sense of guilt. And he 
sought to show that it is an evil self-originated in the 
will ; a fact mysterious, not to be explained, but to be 
felt by each man in his conscience as his own deed. 
Therefore, in the confession of his faith, he said : — 
13 



194 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

" I believe (and hold it a fundamental article of 
Christianity) that I am a fallen creature ; that I am 
myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable 
of moral good ; and that an evil ground existed in my 
will previously to any given act, or assignable moment 
of time, in my own consciousness. I am born a child 
of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to under- 
stand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, but 
I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain 
of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would it- 
self be a contradiction were it not so ; and what is real 
must be possible." 

And the sequel of the same confession thus goes 
on: — 

" I receive, with full and grateful faith, the assur- 
ance of revelation that the Word, which is from eternity 
with God, and is God, assumed our human nature, in 
order to redeem me and all mankind from this our con- 
nate corruption. My reason convinces me that no 

other mode of redemption is possible I believe 

that this assumption of humanity by the Son of God 
was revealed and realized to us by the Word made 
flesh, and manifested to us in Jesus Christ, and that his 
miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resur- 
rection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our re- 
demption, and necessary parts of the awful process." 

Such was his belief in 1816, marking how great a 
mental revolution he must have gone through since the 
days when he was a Unitarian preacher. The steps 
of that change he has himself but partially recorded. 
But the abandonment of the Hartleian for a more ideal 
philosophy, the blight that fell on his manhood, his suf- 
fering, and sense of inner misery, then the closer study 
of the Bible in the light of his own need, and growing 
intercourse with the works of the elder divines, — all 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 195 

these were steps at least in the transition. But what- 
ever may have wrought this change, no one who knows 
anything of Coleridge can doubt that in this, as in 
opinions of lesser import, he was influenced only by 
the sincerest desire for truth. Great as may have 
been his moral defects — far as he may have fallen, in 
some of the homeliest duties, even below common men, 
this at least must be conceded to him, that he desired 
the truth, hungered and thirsted for it, pursued it with 
a life-long earnestness, rare even among the best men. 
In this search for truth, and in his declaration of it 
when found, self-interest, party feeling, friendship, had 
no place with him. He had come to believe in some 
sort in a Trinity in the Godhead, and admitted more 
or less the personality of the Logos, for some time be- 
fore he returned fully to the Catholic faith. The be- 
lief in the Incarnation and Redemption by the Cross, as 
historical facts, were the stumbling-blocks which last 
disappeared. Therefore his final conviction on this 
subject, as recorded in the " Aids to Reflection," is the 
more worthy of regard, as being the last step taken by 
one who had long resisted, and only after profound re- 
flection submitted himself to this faith. He there lays 
down, that as sin is the ground or occasion of Chris- 
tianity, so Redemption is its superstructure ; that Re- 
demption and Christianity are equivalent terms. From 
this he does not attempt to remove the awful mystery, 
but only to clear away any objections which may 
spring out of the moral instincts of man against the 
common interpretation of the doctrine. These are the 
only difficulties that deserve an answer. 

In the Redemption, the agent is the Eternal Word 
made flesh, standing in the place of man to God, and of 
God to man, fulfilling all righteousness, suffering, dying, 
and so dying as to conquer death itself, and for all who 



196 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

shall receive Him. The redemptive or atoning act 
of this divine Agent has two sides — one that looks 
Godward, the other that looks manward. The side 
it turns Godward — that is, the essence of the aton- 
ing act, the cause of man's redemption — is " a spir- 
itual and transcendent mystery which passeth all 
understanding ; " its nature, mode, and possibility, 
transcend man's comprehension. But the side that it 
turns manward — that is, the effect upon the re- 
deemed — is most simply, and without metaphor, de- 
scribed, as far as it is comprehensible by man, in St. 
John's words, as the being born anew ; as at first we 
were born in the flesh to the world, so now born in the 
Spirit of Christ. Christ was made a quickening, that 
is a life-making Spirit. This, Coleridge believed to be 
the nearest, most immediate effect on man of the trans- 
cendent redemptive act. Closely connected with this 
first, most immediate effect, are other consequences, 
which St. Paul has described by four principal meta- 
phors. These consequences, in reference to the sinner, 
are either the taking away of guilt, as by a great sin- 
offering, just as to the transgressor of the Mosaic law 
his civil stain was cleared away by the ceremonial 
offering of the priest ; or the reconciliation of the sin- 
ner to God, as the prodigal son is reconciled to the 
parent whom he has injured; or the satisfying of a 
debt by the payment of the sum owed to the creditor; 
or the ransoming of a slave, the bringing him back 
from slavery, by payment of a price for him. These 
four figures describe, each in a different way, the result 
of the great redemptive act on sinful man. This is 
their true meaning. They are figures intended to 
bring home to man in a practical way the nature and 
the greatness of the benefit. Popularly they are 
transferred back to the mysterious cause, but they can- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 197 

not be taken as if they really and adequately explained 
the nature of that cause, without leading to confusions. 
Debt, satisfaction, payment in full, are not terms by 
which the essential nature of the atoning act, and its 
necessity, can be literally and adequately expressed. 
If, forgetting this, we take these expressions literally, 
and argue from them, as if they gave real intellectual 
insight into the nature and mode of that greatest of all 
mysteries, we are straightway landed in moral contra- 
dictions. The nature of the redemptive act, as it is in 
itself, is not to be compassed nor uttered by the lan- 
guage of the human understanding. Such, as nearly as 
I can give it, was Coleridge's thought upon this great 
mystery. Whatever may be the value of this view, 
one thing is to be observed, that Coleridge did not pro- 
pound it with any hope of explaining a subject which 
he believed to be beyond man's power of explanation, 
but from the earnest desire to clear away moral hin- 
drances to its full acceptance. Such hindrances he be- 
lieved that human theologies, in their attempts to sys- 
temize this and other doctrines of Scripture, were from 
time to time piling up. It was his endeavor, whether 
successful or not, in what he wrote on this and on 
every other religious subject, to clear away these hin- 
drances, and to place the truth in a light which shall 
commend itself to every man's conscience, a light which 
shall be consistent with such fundamental Scriptures as 
these, " I, the Lord, speak righteousness, I declare 
things that are right ; " " God is light, and in Him is no 
darkness at all." Since his day, men's thoughts have 
been exercised on the nature of the atonement, as per- 
haps they never were before. There is one view, of 
late years advocated in various forms, which regards 
the atonement as merely such a declaration or exhibi- 
tion of God's love to sinners, as by the pure power of 



198 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

its clemency awakens them to repentance, and takes 
away the estrangement of their hearts. This is no 
doubt part of the truth, but it falls far short of satisfy- 
ing either man's deeper moral instincts, or those many 
passages of Scripture which declare that forgiveness of 
sins is one great need of the soul, and that Christ's 
death is the means through which forgiveness is made 
possible. Such interpretations, if taken for the whole, 
leave out of account the "more behind," which Scrip- 
ture bears witness to, and man's conscience needs. 
They take no account of that bearing which Christ's 
death has toward God, and which Coleridge, while he 
held it to be incomprehensible, fully believed to exist. 
On this great question, the nature of the atoning act 
in its relation to God, some meditations have since 
Coleridge's time been given to the world, which, while 
penetrating deeper, seem yet in harmony with that 
which Coleridge taught. I allude to Mr. Campbell's pro- 
found work, " The Nature of the Atonement," in which, 
though all the difficulties are not cleared up, the author 
goes further toward satisfying at once many of the ex- 
pressions of Scripture and the requirements of conscience 
than any other theological work I know of has done. 

Such are a few samples of Coleridge's theological 
method and manner of thinking. In the wish to set 
them forth in something of a systematic order, I have 
done but scanty justice to the fullness and the practical 
fervor which pervade the " Aids to Reflection," and I 
have given no notion at all of the prodigality of 
thought with which his other works run over. It were 
vain to hope that any words could give an impression 
of that marvellous range of vision, that richness, that 
swing of thought, that lightning of genius. Besides 
his works already noticed, his " Lay Sermons," with 
their Appendices, and his " Literary Remains," are a 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 199 

very quarry of thought, from which young and reflect- 
ing readers may dig wealth of unexhausted ore. But 
over these I cannot now linger. 

Neither can I do more than merely allude to those 
remarkable letters, published after his death, in which 
Coleridge approaches the great question of the inspira- 
tion of Scripture. Arnold recognized their appearance 
as marking an era in theology the most important that 
had occurred since the Reformation ; and the interval 
that has since passed has not diminished their historical 
importance. On the views of Scripture there pro- 
pounded Coleridge himself laid great stress. In the 
words of his nephew, " he pleaded for them so ear- 
nestly, as the only middle path of safety and peace 
between a godless disregard of the unique and trans- 
cendent character of the Bible taken generally, and 
that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to 
the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly 
arrays our faith in opposition to our reason, and incul- 
cates the sacrifice of the latter to the former, that to 
suppress this important part of his solemn convictions, 
would be to misrepresent and betray him." 

When these letters first appeared, they struck the 
loudest, if not the earliest note, which till then had 
been heard in England, of that way of thought which 
has since become known as the Critical School. Rec- 
ognizing, as these letters did, in the different books of 
Scripture, various degrees and diverse modes of inspira- 
tion, and in all the books the co-presence of the human 
element with the Divine Word, they startled from 
their " dogmatic slumbers " the many who had hitherto 
held a merely mechanical view of the inspiring Spirit. 
The Critical School, which in this country may be 
almost said to date its rise from the appearance of 
these letters, has since then parted into two widely 



200 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

divergent paths. One party have so busied themselves 
with investigating the earthly accompaniments of time, 
place, and character, that they seem ever less and less 
to overhear the divine voice that speaks through these. 
Those who have taken the other path, while examining 
closely the " earthen vessel," and its historical forma- 
tion, have used this study only to enable them to pene- 
trate deeper into the true nature of the heavenly 
treasure which it enshrines. That these last are the 
legitimate representatives of the Coleridgean theology, 
the true inheritors of the principles he taught, will, if 
I have interpreted him aright, need no further proof. 

Having given the fullest scope to his own inquiries 
on all subjects, yet in a spirit of reverence, he wished 
others to do the same, believing this to be a condition 
of arriving at assured convictions of truth. He was 
full of wise and large-hearted tolerance, — not that 
tolerance, so common and so worthless, which easily 
bears with all opinions, because it earnestly holds none, 
— but that tolerance, attained but by few, which, 
holding firmly by convictions of its own, and making 
conscience of them, would neither coerce nor condemn 
those who most strongly deny them. Heresy he be- 
lieved to be an error, not of the head, but of the heart. 
He distinguished between that internal faith which lies 
at the base of religious character, and can be judged 
of only by God, and that belief with regard to facts 
and doctrines, in which good men may err without 
moral obliquity. His works abound with such maxims 
as this : " Resist every false doctrine ; but call no man 
heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make 
the man a heretic ; but an evil heart can make any 
doctrine heretical." 

These are a few of the contemplations with which 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge busied himself during the 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 201 

threescore years of his earthly existence. For more 
than thirty years now he has been beyond them, but 
these he has left behind for us to use as we may. 
Those who remember what Coleridge was to their 
youth, may fear lest in their estimate of him now they 
should seem to be mere praisers of the past, and yet, 
if they were to call him the greatest thinker whom 
Britain has during this century produced, they would 
be but stating the simple truth. For if any should 
gainsay this, it might be asked, Whom would you place 
by his side ? What one man would you name who has 
thrown upon the world so great a mass of original 
thinking, has awakened so much new thought on the 
most important subjects ? His mind was a very treas- 
ure-house of ideas, of which many have gone to enrich 
the various departments of thought, literary, philosoph- 
ical, political, and religious ; while others still lie im- 
bedded in his works, waiting for those who may still 
turn them to use. And all he wrote was in the 
interest of man's higher nature, true to his best aspira- 
tions. The one effort of all his works was to build up 
truth from the spiritual side. He brought all his 
transcendent powers of intellect to the help of the 
heart, and soul, and spirit of man against the tyranny 
of the understanding, that understanding which ever 
strives to limit truth within its generalizations from 
sense, and rejects whatever refuses to square with- 
these. This side of philosophy, as it is the deepest, is 
also the most difficult to build up. Just as in bridging 
some broad river, that part of the work which has to 
be done by substructions and piers beneath the water, 
is much more laborious and important, while it strikes 
less upon the senses than the arches which are reared 
in open daylight ; so the side of truth which holds by 
the seen and the tangible, which never quits clear-cut 



202 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

conceptions, and refuses to acknowledge whatever will 
not come within these, is much more patent and 
plausible, and, in this country at least, is more likely 
to command the suffrages of the majority. Owing to 
the impulse to thought which proceeded from Coleridge, 
the Sensationalists experienced for a time a brief re- 
action ; for one generation he turned the tide against 
them ; but again they are mustering in full force, and 
bid fair to become masters of the position. Their 
chief teachers have for some time — by the merit, it 
must be owned, of their works — become all but para- 
mount in the most ancient seats of learning. In 
Oxford, for instance, the only two living authors, a 
knowledge of whose works is imperatively required of 
candidates for highest honors, belong to this school. 
And there is no counteracting authority speaking from 
the opposite, that is, the spiritual side of philosophy, 
because no such living voice is amongst us. Whenever 
such a thinker shall arise, he will have to take up the 
work which Coleridge left incomplete, and by more 
patent analysis, and more systematic exposition of the 
spiritual element which enters into all thought and all 
objects of thought, to make good as reasoned truth, the 
ground which Coleridge reached only by far-reaching, 
but fragmentary intuition. One cannot but sometimes 
wonder what his thoughts would have been, had he 
been living now, and looking forth on the wide field 
of modern speculation, where combatants, more numer- 
ous than ever, are, with voices mutually unintelligible, 
shouting in confused night-battle. And not for the 
philosophy only, but for the general literature and the 
politics of our time, what words of admonition would 
he have had, if he had been still present with us ! In 
his own day the oracle of the Whigs reserved for him 
its bitterest raillery, while Toryism looked coldly on. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 203 

He would hardly, I imagine, have been more popular 
with the dominant factions now, Liberal or Conserva- 
tive, for he would not have served the purposes of 
either. Neither before the intellectual idols of the 
hour, whatever names they bear, would he have 
readily bowed down. Rather he would have shown 
to them their own shortcomings, as seen in the light 
of a more catholic and comprehensive wisdom. Who 
can doubt this, when he regards either the spirit of his 
works, so deep-thoughted and reverent, so little suited 
for popularity, or the attitude in which he stood to- 
wards all the arbiters of praise in his own generation ? 
But the best thing that can be said of him is, that he 
was a great religious philosopher. And by this how 
much is meant ? Not a religious man and a philoso- 
pher merely, but a man in whom these two powers met 
and interpenetrated. There are instances enough in 
which the two stand opposed, mutually denouncing each 
other ; instances too there are in which, though not 
opposed, they live apart, the philosophy unleavened by 
the religion. How rare have been the examples, at 
least in modern times, in which the most original pow- 
ers of intellect and imagination, the most ardent search 
for truth, and the largest erudition, have united with 
reverence and simple Christian faith — the heart of the 
child with the wisdom of the sage ! He who has left 
behind him a philosophy, however incomplete, in which * 
these elements combine, has done for his fellow- men 
the highest service human thinker can, has helped to 
lighten the burden of the mystery. 



KEBLE. 



The closing chapter of Lockhart's " Life of Scott " 
begins with these words: "We read in Solomon, ' The 
heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth 
not intermeddle with his joy ; ' and a wise poet of our 
own time thus beautifully expands the saying — 

" i Why should we faint and fear to live alone, 

Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die, 
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own, 
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh ? ' " 

On glancing to the footnote to see who the wise poet 
of our own time might be, the reader saw, for the first 
time perhaps, the name of Keble and " The Christian 
Year." To many, in Scotland at least, this was the 
earliest announcement of the existence of the poet, and 
the work which has immortalized him. If some friend 
soon afterwards happened to bring from England a 
copy of " The Christian Year," and make a present of 
it, the young reader could not but be struck by a lyric 
here and there, which opened a new vein, and struck a 
note of meditative feeling, not exactly like anything he 
had heard before. But the little book contained much 
that was strange and unintelligible, some things even 
startling. Very vague were the rumors which at that 
time reached Scotland of the author. Men said he be- 
longed to a party of Churchmen who were making a 
great stir in Oxford, and leavening the University with 



KEBLE. 205 

a kind of thought which was novel, and supposed to be 
dangerous. The most definite thing said was that the 
new school had a general Romanizing tendency. But 
this must be a mistake or strange exaggeration. Folly 
and sentimentalism might no doubt go far enough at 
Oxford. But as for Romanism, the revival of such an- 
tiquated nonsense was simply impossible in this en- 
lightened nineteenth century. If such an absurdity 
were to show itself openly, was there not still extant 
the u Edinburgh Review " ready to crush it ? To 
many a like folly ere now it had administered the qui- 
etus. Would it not deal as summarily with this one too? 
Such was the kind of talk that was heard when Scott's 
"Life" appeared in 1838. For more exact information, 
young men who were inquisitive had to wait, till a few 
years later gave them opportunities of seeing for them- 
selves, and coming into personal contact with what was 
actually going on in Oxford. 

It was a strange experience for a young man trained 
anywhere, much more for one born and bred in Scot- 
land, and brought up a Presbyterian, to enter Oxford 
when the religious movement was at its height. He 
found himself all at once in the midst of a system of 
teaching which unchurched himself and all whom he 
had hitherto known. In his simplicity he had believed 
that spiritual religion was a thing of the heart, and that 
neither Episcopacy nor Presbytery availeth anything. 
But here were men — able, learned, devout-minded 
men — maintaining that outward rites and ceremonies 
were of the very essence, and that where these were 
not, there was no true Christianity. How could men, 
such as these were reported to be, really go back them- 
selves and try to lead others back to what were but the 
beggarly elements ? It was all very perplexing, not 
to say irritating. However, there might be something 



206 KEBLE. 

more behind, which a young man could not understand. 
So he would wait and see what he should see. 

Soon he came to know that the only portions of 
Oxford society unaffected by the new influence, were 
the two extremes. The older dons, that is, the heads 
of* houses and the senior tutors, were unmoved by it, 
except to opposition. The whole younger half of the 
undergraduates generally took no part in it. But the 
great body that lay between these extremes, that is, 
most of the younger fellows of colleges, and most of 
the scholars and elder undergraduates, at least those 
of them who read or thought at all, were in some way 
or other busy with the new questions. When in time 
the new comer began to know some of the men who 
sympathized with the movement, his first impression 
was of something constrained and reserved in their 
manners and deportment. High character and ability 
many of them were said to have ; but to a chance 
observer it seemed that, in as far as their system had 
moulded them, it had made them the opposite of nat- 
ural in their views of things, and in their whole mental 
attitude. You longed for some free breath of moun- 
tain air to sweep away the stifling atmosphere that 
was about you. This might come partly, no doubt, 
from the feeling with which you knew that these men 
must from their system regard you, and all who had 
the misfortune to be born outside of their sacred pale. 
Not that they ever expressed such views in your hear- 
ing. Good manners, as well as their habitual reserve, 
forbade this. But, though they did not say it, you 
knew quite well that they felt it. And if at any time 
the " young barbarian " put a direct question, or made 
a remark which went straight at these opinions, they 
would only look at him, astonished at his rudeness and 
profanity, and shrink into themselves. 



KEBLE. 207 

Now and then, however, it would happen that some 
adherent, or even leading man of the movement, more 
frank and outspoken than the rest, would deign to 
speak out his principles, and even to discuss them with 
undergraduates and controversial Scots. To him urg- 
ing the necessity of Apostolical Succession, and the 
sacerdotal view of the Sacraments, some young man 
might venture to reply, " Well ! if all you say be 
true, then I never can have known a Christian. For 
up to this time I have lived among people who were 
strangers to all these things, which, you tell me, are 
essentials of Christianity. And I am quite sure that, 
if I have never known a Christian till now, I shall 
never know one." The answer to this would probably 
be, a There is much in what you say. No doubt high 
virtues, very like the Christian graces, are to be found 
outside of the Christian Church. But it is a remark- 
able thing, those best acquainted with Church history 
tell me, that outside of the pale of the Church the 
saintly character is never found." This naif reply was 
not likely to have much weight with the young list- 
ener. It would have taken something stronger to 
make him break faith with all that was most sacred 
in his early recollections. Beautiful examples of Pres- 
byterian piety had stamped impressions on his memory 
not to be effaced by sacerdotal theories or subtleties 
of the schools. And the Church system which began 
by disowning these examples placed a barrier to its 
acceptance at the very outset. 

But however unbelievable their theory, further ac- 
quaintance with the younger men of the new school, 
whether junior fellows or undergraduate scholars, dis- 
closed many traits of character that could not but 
awaken respect or something more. If there was 
about many of them a constraint and reserve which 



208 KEBLE. 

seemed unnatural, there was also in many an unworld- 
liness and self-denial, a purity of life and elevation of 
aim, in some a generosity of purpose and depth of 
devotion, not to be gainsaid. Could the movement 
which produced these qualities, or even attracted them 
to itself, be wholly false and bad ? This movement, 
moreover, when at its height, extended its influence 
far beyond the circle of those who directly adopted its 
views. There was not, in Oxford at least, a reading 
man who was not more or less indirectly influenced 
by it. Only the very idle or the \ery frivolous were 
wholly proof against it. On all others it impressed 
a sobriety of conduct and a seriousness not usually 
found among large bodies of young men. It raised 
the tone of average morality in Oxford to a level which 
perhaps it had never before reached. You may call 
it over-wrought and too highly strung. Perhaps it 
was. It was better, however, for young men to be so, 
than to be doubters or cynics. 

If such was the general aspect of Oxford society at 
that time, where was the centre and soul from which 
so mighty a power emanated ? It lay, and had for 
some years lain, mainly in one man — a man in many 
ways the most remarkable that England has seen dur- 
ing this century, perhaps the most remarkable whom 
the English Church has produced in any century, — 
John Henry Newman. 

The influence he had gained, apparently without 
setting himself to seek it, was something altogether 
unlike anything else in our time. A mysterious ven- 
eration had by degrees gathered round him, till now 
it was almost as though some Ambrose or Augustine 
of elder ages had reappeared. He himself tells how 
one day, when he was an undergraduate, a friend with 



KEBLE. 209 

whom he was walking in the Oxford street cried out 
eagerly, " There's Keble ! " and with what awe he 
looked at him ! A few years, and the same took 
place with regard to himself. In Oriel Lane light- 
hearted undergraduates would drop their voices and 
whisper, " There's Newman ! " when, head thrust for- 
ward, and gaze fixed as though on some vision seen 
only by himself, with swift, noiseless step he glided by. 
Awe fell on them for a moment, almost as if it had 
been some apparition that had passed. For his inner 
circle of friends, many of them younger men, he was 
said to have a quite romantic affection, which they re- 
turned with the most ardent devotion and the intensest 
faith in him. But to the outer world he was a mys- 
tery. What were the qualities that inspired these 
feelings ? There was of course learning and refine- 
ment, there was genius, not indeed of a philosopher, 
but of a subtle and original thinker, • an unequaled 
edge of dialectic, and these all glorified by the imagi- 
nation of a poet. Then there was the utter unworld- 
liness, the setting at naught of all things which men 
most prize, the tamelessness of soul, which was ready 
to essay the impossible. Men felt that here was — 

" One of that small transfigured band 
Which the world cannot tame." 

It was this mysteriousness which, beyond all his, gifts 
of head and heart, so strangely fascinated and over- 
awed, — that something about him which made it im- 
possible to reckon his course and take his bearings, 
that soul-hunger and quenchless yearning which nothing 
short of the eternal could satisfy. This deep and reso- 
lute ardor, this tenderness yet severity of soul, were 
no doubt an offense not to be forgiven by older men, 
especially by the wary and worldly-wise ; but in these 
14 



210 KEBLE. 

lay the very spell which drew to him the hearts of all 
the younger and the more enthusiastic. Such was the 
impression he had made in Oxford just before he re- 
linquished his hold on it. And if at that time it seemed 
to persons at a distance extravagant and absurd, they 
may since have learnt that there was in him who was 
the object of this reverence enough to justify it. 

But it may be asked, What actions or definite results 
were there to account for so deep and wide-spread a 
veneration ? There were no doubt the numerous prod- 
ucts of his prolific pen, his works, controversial, theo- 
logical, religious. But none of these were so deep in 
learning as some of Dr. Pusey's writings, nor so widely 
popular as " The Christian Year ; " and yet both Dr. 
Pusey and Mr. Keble were at that time quite second in 
importance to Mr. Newman. The centre from which 
his power went forth was the pulpit of St. Mary's, 
with those wonderful afternoon sermons. Sunday after 
Sunday, month by month, year by year, they went on, 
each continuing and deepening the impression the last 
had made. As the afternoon service at St. Mary's 
interfered with the dinner-hour of the colleges, most 
men preferred a warm dinner without Newman's sermon 
to a cold one with it, so the audience was not crowded 
— the large church little more than half filled. The 
service was very simple, — no pomp, no ritualism ; for 
it was characteristic of the leading men of the move- 
ment that they left these things to the weaker brethren. 
Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great ques- 
tions which touched the heart of unseen things. About 
the service, the most remarkable thing was the beauty, 
the silver intonation, of Mr. Newman's voice, as he read 
the Lessons. It seemed to bring new meaning out of the 
familiar words. Still lingers in memory the tone with 
which he read, " But Jerusalem which is above is free, 



KEBLE. 211 

which is the mother of us all." When he began to 
preach, a stranger was not likely to be much struck, 
especially if he had been accustomed to pulpit oratory 
of the Boanerges sort. Here was no vehemence, no 
declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so that 
one who came prepared to hear a " great intellectual 
effort " was almost sure to go away disappointed. 
Indeed, I believe that if he had preached one of his 
St. Mary's sermons before a Scotch town congregation, 
they would have thought the preacher a " silly body." 
The delivery had a peculiarity which it took a new 
hearer some time to get over. Each separate sentence, 
or at least each short paragraph, was spoken rapidly, 
but with great clearness of intonation ; and then at its 
close there was a pause, lasting for nearly half a min- 
ute ; then another rapidly but clearly spoken sentence, 
followed by another pause. It took some time to get 
over this, but, that once done, the wonderful charm 
began to dawn on you. The look and bearing of the 
preacher were as of one who dwelt apart, who, though 
he knew his age well, did not live in it. From his 
seclusion of study, and abstinence, and prayer, from 
habitual dwelling in the unseen, he seemed to come 
forth that one day of the week to speak to others of the 
things he had seen and known. Those who never 
heard him might fancy that his sermons would generally 
be about apostolical succession or rights of the Church, 
or against Dissenters. Nothing of the kind. You 
might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to 
these things. What there was of High Church teach- 
ing was implied rather than enforced. The local, the 
temporary, and the modern were ennobled by the pres- 
ence of the catholic truth belonging to all ages that 
pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly 
in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched 



212 KEBLE. 

into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Chris- 
tians acknowledge, but most have ceased to feel — when 
he spoke of " Unreal Words," of u The Individuality of 
the Soul," of "The Invisible World," of a" Particular 
Providence ; " or again, of " The Ventures of Faith," 
" Warfare the condition of Victory," " The Cross of 
Christ the Measure of the World," " The Church a 
Home for the Lonely." As he spoke, how the old 
truth became new! how it came home with a meaning 
never felt before ! He laid his finger — how gently, 
yet how powerfully ! — on some inner place in the 
hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he 
had never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it 
would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution 
and big words to state, were dropt out by the way in a 
sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon. What 
delicacy of style, yet what calm power! how gentle, yet 
how strong ! how simple, yet how suggestive ! how 
homely, yet how refined ! how penetrating, yet how 
tender-hearted ! If now and then there was a forlorn 
undertone which at the time seemed inexplicable, if he 
spoke of " many a sad secret which a man dare not tell 
lest he find no sympathy," of " secrets lying like cold 
ice upon the heart," of " some solitary incommunicable 
grief," you might be perplexed at the drift of what he 
spoke, but you felt all the more drawn to the speaker. 
To call these sermons eloquent would be no word for 
them ; high poems they rather were, as of an inspired 
singer, or the outpourings as of a prophet, rapt yet self- 
possessed. And the tone of voice in which they were 
spoken, once you grew accustomed to it, sounded like a 
fine strain of unearthly music. Through the stillness 
of that high Gothic building the words fell on the ear 
like the measured drippings of water in some vast dim 
cave. After hearing these sermons you might come 



KEBLE. 213 

away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High 
Church system ; but you would be harder than most 
men, if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of 
coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel 
the things of faith brought closer to the soul. 

There was one occasion of a different kind, when he 
spoke from St. Mary's pulpit for the last time, not as 
Parish minister, but as University preacher. It was 
the crisis of the movement. On the 2d of February, 
1843, the Feast of the Purification, all Oxford assem- 
bled to hear what Newman had to say, and St. Mary's 
was crowded to the door. The subject he spoke of was 
"The theory of Development in Christian Doctrine," 
a subject which since then has become common prop- 
erty, but which at that time was new even to the 
ablest men in Oxford. For an hour and a half he 
drew out the argument, and perhaps the acutest there 
did not quite follow the entire line of thought, or felt 
wearied by the length of it, lightened though it was 
by some startling illustrations. Such was the famous 
" Protestantism has at various times developed into 
Polygamy," or the still more famous " Scripture says the 
sun moves round the earth, Science that the earth moves, 
and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we de- 
termine which of these opposite statements is true, till 
we know what motion is ? " Few probably who heard it 
have forgot the tone of voice with which he uttered 
the beautiful passage about music as the audible em- 
bodiment of some unknown reality behind, itself 
sweeping like a strain of splendid music out of the 
heart of a subtle argument : — 

" Take another instance of an outward and earthly 
form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown 
seem to be typified; I mean musical sounds, as they 
are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. 



214 KEBLE. 

There are seven notes in the scale ; make them four- 
teen ; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enter- 
prise ! What science brings so much out of so little ? 
Out of what poor elements does some master create 
his new world ! Shall we say that all this exuberant 
inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like 
some game or fashion of the day, without reality, with- 
out meaning ? We may do so ; and then, perhaps, we 
shall also account the science of theology to be a mat- 
ter of words ; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology 
of the Church, which those who feel cannot communi- 
cate, so there is also in the wonderful creation of sub- 
limity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many 
men the very names which the science employs are 
utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a 
subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, and of the views 
which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance ; 
yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and 
disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate 
yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a 
mere sound which is gone and perishes ? Can it be 
that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emo- 
tions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, 
and awful impressions from we know not whence, 
should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and 
comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is 
not so ! it cannot be. No ; they have escaped from 
some higher sphere ; they are the outpourings of eter- 
nal harmony in the medium of created sound ; they 
are echoes from our Home ; they are the voices of An- 
gels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws 
of Divine governance, or the Divine attributes ; some- 
thing are they besides themselves, which we cannot 
compass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man, 
and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his 
fellows, has the power of eliciting them. ,, 



KEBLE. 215 

This was preached in the winter of 1843, the last 
time he appeared in the University pulpit. His paro- 
chial sermons had by this time assumed an uneasy tone 
which perplexed his followers with fear of change. 
That summer solved their doubt. In the quiet chapel 
of Littlemore, which he himself had built, when all 
Oxford was absent during the long vacation, he 
preached his last Anglican sermon to the country peo- 
ple and only a few friends, and poured forth that 
mournful and thrilling farewell to the Church of Eng- 
land. The sermon is entitled u The Parting of 
Friends." The text was " Man goeth forth to his 
work and his labor until the evening." He went 
through all the instances which Scripture records of 
human affection sorely tried, reproducing the incidents 
almost in the very words of Scripture, — Jacob, Ha- 
gar, Naomi, Jonathan and David, St. Paul and the 
elders of Ephesus, and last, the weeping over Jerusa- 
lem, and the " Behold, your house is left unto you deso- 
late," — and then he bursts forth — 

" A lesson, surely, and a warning to us all, in every 
place where He puts his name, to the end of time, lest 
we be cold towards his gifts, or unbelieving towards 
his word, or jealous of his workings, or heartless to- 
wards his mercies O mother of saints ! O 

school of the wise ! O nurse of the heroic ! of whom 
went forth, in whom have dwelt memorable names of 
old, to spread the truth abroad, or to cherish and il- 
lustrate it at home ! thou, from whom surrounding 
nations lit their lamps ! virgin of Israel ! where- 
fore dost thou now sit on the ground and keep si- 
lence, like one of the foolish women who were with- 
out oil on the coming of the Brideo*room ? Where 
is now the ruler in Sion, and the doctor in the Tem- 
ple, and the ascetic on Carmel, and the herald in the 



216 KEBLE. 

wilderness, and the preacher in the market-place ? 
Where are thy ' effectual fervent prayers ' offered in 
secret, and thy alms and good works coming up as a 
memorial before God ? How is it, once holy place, 
that " the land mourneth, for the corn is wasted, the 
new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth, because joy 
is withered away from the sons of men ' ? ' Alas for 
the day ! how do the beasts groan ! the herds of cattle 
are perplexed, because they have no pasture ; yea, the 
flocks are made desolate.' ' Lebanon is ashamed and 
hewn down ; Sharon is like a wilderness, and Bashan 
and Carmel shake off their fruits.' O my mother, 
whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good things 
poured upon thee and canst not keep them, and bearest 
children, yet darest not own them ? Why hast thou 
not the skill to use their services, nor the heart to re- 
joice in their love ? How is it that whatever is gener- 
ous in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy 
flower and thy promise falls from thy bosom, and finds 
no home within thine arms? Who hath put this note 
upon thee, to have ' a miscarrying womb and dry 
breasts,' to be strange to thine own flesh, and thine 
eye cruel to thy little ones ? Thine own offspring, the 
fruit of thy womb, who would love thee and would 
toil for thee, thou dost gaze upon with fear as though a 
portent, or thou dost loathe as an offense ; at best thou 
dost but endure, as if they had no claim but on thy 
patience, self-possession, and vigilance, to be rid of 
them as easily as thou mayest. Thou makest them 
' stand all the day idle ' as the very condition of thy 
bearing with them ; or thou biddest them begone where 
they will be more welcome ; or thou sellest them for 
naught to the stranger that passes by. And what wilt 
thou do in the end thereof? 

" Scripture is a refuge in any trouble ; only let us 



KEBLE. 217 

be on our guard against seeming to use it further than 
is fitting, or doing more than sheltering ourselves under 
its shadow. Let us use it according to our measure. 
It is far higher and wider than our need, and it con- 
ceals our feelings while it gives expression to them. 
It is sacred and heavenly ; and it restrains and purifies, 

, while it sanctions them And my brethren, O 

kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should 
you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or 
by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to 
act ; if he has ever told you what you knew about 
yourselves, or what you did not know ; has read to you 
your wants and feelings, and comforted you by the very 
reading ; has made you feel that there was a higher 
life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that 
you see ; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened 
a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed, if 
what he has said or done has ever made you take in- 
terest in him, and feel well- inclined towards him, re- 
member such a one in time to come, though you hear 
him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may 
know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to 
fulfill it." 

Then followed the resignation of his fellowship, the 
retirement to Littlemore, the withdrawal even from the 
intercourse of his friends, the unloosing of all the ties that 
bound him to Oxford, the two years' pondering of the 
step he was about to take. And at last, when in 1845 
he went away to the Church of Rome, he did it by 
himself, making himself as much as possible responsible 
only for his own act, and followed by but one or two 
young friends who would not be kept back. Those 
who witnessed these things, and knew that, if a large 
following had been his object, he might, by leaving the 
Church of England three years earlier, in the pleni- 



218 KEBLE. 

tude of his power, have taken almost all the flower of 
young Oxford with him, needed no " Apologia," to con- 
vince them of his honesty of purpose. 

On these things, looking over an interval of five and 
twenty years, how vividly comes back the remembrance 
of the aching blank, the awful pause, which fell on 
Oxford when that voice had ceased, and we knew that 
we should hear it no more. It was as when, to one 
kneeling by night, in the silence of some vast cathedral, 
the great bell tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly 
gone still. To many, no doubt, the pause was not of 
long continuance. Soon they began to look this way 
and that for new teachers, and to rush vehemently to 
the opposite extreme of thought. But there were those 
who could not so lightly forget. All the more these 
withdrew into themselves. On Sunday forenoons and 
evenings, in the retirement of their rooms, the printed 
words of those marvelous sermons would thrill them 
till they wept " abundant and most sweet tears." Since 
then many voices of powerful teachers they may have 
heard, but none that ever penetrated the soul like his. 

Such was the impression made by that eventful time 
on impartial but not uninterested spectators — on those 
who by early education and conviction were kept quite 
aloof from the peculiar tenets of High Churchmen, but 
who could not but acknowledge the moral quickening 
which resulted from the movement, and the marvelous 
character of him who was the soul of it. 

Dr. Newman himself tells us that all the while the 
true and primary author of that movement was out of 
sight. The Rev. John Keble was at a distance from 
Oxford, in his vicarage at Hursley, there living in his 
own life, and carrying out in his daily services and par- 
ish ministry, those truths which he had first brought 
forward, and Newman had carried out, in Oxford. But 



KEBLE. 219 

though out of sight, he was not out of mind. "The 
Christian Year" was in the hands of every one, even 
the youngest undergraduate. Besides its more intrinsic 
qualities, the tone of it blended well with the sentiment 
which the venerable aspect of the old city awakened. 
It used to be pleasing to try and identify amid the 
scenery around Oxford some of the spots from which 
were drawn those descriptions of nature with which the 
poems are inlaid. During these years the poet-priest's 
figure was but seldom seen in the streets of Oxford, — 
only when some great question affecting the Church, 
some discussion of No. 90, or trial of Mr. Ward, had 
summoned Convocation together. Once, if my memory 
serves, I remember to have seen him in the University 
pulpit at St. Mary's, but his voice was not strong, and 
did not reach many of the audience. His service to his 
party had lain in another direction. It was he who, 
by his character, had first awakened a new tone of sen- 
timent in Oxford, and attracted to himself whatever else 
was like-minded. He had sounded the first note which 
woke that sentiment into action, and embodied it in a 
party. He had kept up, though from a distance, sym- 
pathetic intercourse with the chief actors, counseled 
and encouraged them. Above all, he gave poetry to 
the movement, and a poetic aspect. Polemics by them- 
selves are dreary work. They do not touch the springs 
of young hearts. But he who, in the midst of any line 
of thought, unlocks a fountain of genuine poetry, does 
more to humanize it and win for it a way to men's 
affections, than he who writes a hundred volumes, how- 
ever able, of controversy. Without disparagement to 
the patristic and other learning of the party, the two 
permanent monuments of genius which it has be- 
queathed to England may be said to be Newman's 
" Parochial Sermons," and Keble's " Christian Year." 



220 KEBLE. 

All that was known of Keble at that time to the 
outer world of Oxford was vague and scanty. The few 
facts here added are taken from what has since been 
made public by two of his most attached friends, Sir 
John Coleridge and Dr. Newman, the former in his 
beautiful letters, memorial of Keble, the latter in his 
" Apologia." Yet these facts, though few, are well worthy 
of attention, both because Keble's character is more 
than his poetry, and because his poetry can only be 
rightly understood in the light of his character. For 
there is no poet whose poetry is more truly an image 
of the man himself, both in his inner nature and in his 
outward circumstances. 

His father, whose name the poet bore, was a country 
clergyman, vicar of Coin St. Aldwyns, in Gloucester- 
shire, but the house in which he lived, and in which 
the poet was born, was at Fairford, three miles distant 
from the cure. John was the second child and elder 
son of a family which consisted of two sons and two 
daughters. His mother, Sarah Maule, was, as I have 
heard, of Scottish extraction. The father, who lived 
till his ninetieth year, was a man of no common ability. 
Of him his son, we are told, " always spoke not only 
with the love of a son, but with the profoundest rever- 
ence for his goodness and wisdom." It would seem 
that this was one of the few clerical homes in England 
in which the opinions, traditions, and peculiar piety of 
the Nonjurors lived on into the present century. Un- 
like most sons distinguished for ability, John Keble 
never outgrew the period of absolute filial reverence, 
never questioned a single opinion or prepossession 
which he had imbibed from his father. Some of his 
less reverential companions used to think that this was 
an intellectual loss to him. 

The father's ability and scholarship are proved by 



KEBLE. 221 

his having himself educated his son, and sent him up to 
Oxford so well prepared, that at the age of fifteen he 
gained a Corpus scholarship, an honor which seems to 
have then held the same place in University estimation 
that Balliol scholarships have long held and still hold. 
This strictly home training, in the quiet of a Gloucester- 
shire parsonage, placed in the very heart of rural Eng- 
land, under a roof where the old High Church tradition 
lived on, blending with what was best in modern piety, 
makes itself felt in every line the poet wrote. On all 
hands one hears it said that there is no education like 
that of one of the old English public schools. For the 
great run of ordinary boys, whether quick-witted and 
competitive, or lazy and self-indulgent, it may be so ; 
but for natures of finer texture, for all boys who have 
a decided and original bias, how much is there that the 
rough handling of a public school would ruthlessly 
crush ? From all the better public- schools coarse 
bullying, I know, has disappeared ; but for peculiarity 
of any kind, for whatever does not conform itself to the 
" tyrant tradition " — a manly and straightforward one, 
I admit — they have still but little tolerance. If Keble 
had once imbibed the public school spirit, " The Chris- 
tian Year " would either never have been written at 
all, or it would have been written otherwise than it is. 

If he was fortunate in having his boy-education at 
home, he was not less happy in the college which he 
entered and the companions he met there. It is the 
happiness of college life that a young man can com- 
mand just as much retirement, and as much society as 
he pleases, and of the kind that he pleases. All read- 
ers of Arnold's life will remember the picture there 
drawn of the Scholars' Common Room at Corpus, by 
one of the last survivors, the venerable Sir J. Coleridge. 



222 KEBLE. 

He tells us that, when Keble came into residence, early 
in 1807, it was but a small society, numbering only 
about twenty undergraduate scholars, and these rather 
under the usual age, who lived on the most familiar 
terms with each other. The Bachelor scholars resided 
and lived entirely with the undergraduates. Two of 
Keble's chief friends among the Corpus scholars, though 
younger in academic standing than himself, were Cole- 
ridge (afterwards Judge Coleridge) and Arnold. Keble 
indeed must have already graduated before Arnold 
came into residence. Besides these were many other 
men distinguished in their day in the University, but 
less known to the outer world. It was a stirring time 
when Keble was an undergraduate. Within the Uni- 
versity the first wakening after long slumber had be- 
gun, and competitions for honors had been just estab- 
lished. From without news of the great Peninsular 
battles was from time to time arriving. Scott's trum- 
pet-blasts of poetry were stirring young hearts. In 
Corpus Common Room, as elsewhere, the Peninsular 
battles were fought over again, and the classical and 
romantic schools of poetry were vehemently discussed. 
And among these more exciting subjects, the young 
scholar Coleridge would insinuate the stiller and deeper 
tones of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, which, then but 
little known, he had heard of from his uncle the poet. 
These two, Scott and Wordsworth, were to the end 
Keble's first favorites of contemporary poets, and chiefly 
moulded his taste and style. Most of the scholars were 
high Tories in Church and State, great respecters of 
things as they are : none, no doubt, more so than 
Keble. The great questioner of the prevailing creed 
was Arnold, who often brought down on his own head 
the concentrated arguments of the whole Common 
Room. But youth's genial warmth healed these under- 



KEBLE. 223 

graduate disputes, as, alas ! the same controversies 
could not be healed when taken up by the same com- 
batants at a later day. In that kindly atmosphere 
Keble's affectionate nature expanded as a flower in the 
sun. His was a temperament to drink in deeply what- 
ever there was of finest influence in Oxford. No doubt 
the learning he there gained was something to him, but 
far more was the vision of the fair city herself, "with 
high aisle, and solemn cloister, seated among groves, 
green meadows, and calm streams." These, and the 
young friendships which they for a few years embosom, 
are what made Oxford then, and make it even now, the 
one spot in England wherein " the curled darlings of 
the nation " find romance still realized. Keble seems 
to have been much the same in character then as in 
after years. His affection towards the friends he made 
at Oxford was warm and deep, and lasted in most in- 
stances with his life. With what feelings they regarded 
him may be gathered from the words of nis brother 
scholar at Corpus, who, when their fifty-five years' 
friendship had come to its earthly close, could say of 
him, " It was the singular happiness of his nature, re- 
markable even in his undergraduate days, that love for 
him was always sanctified, as it were, by reverence — 
reverence that did not make the love less tender, and 
love that did but add intensity to the reverence." 

In Easter term, 1810, Keble obtained double first 
class honors, and this success was soon afterwards 
followed by another still greater — his election to an 
Oriel fellowship. The Oriel Common Room numbered 
among its Fellows, then and for some time afterwards, 
all that was most distinguished in Oxford for mental 
power and originality. Copleston, Davidson, Whately, 
then belonged to it, and were among Keble's electors. 
Arnold, Newman, Pusey, soon afterwards followed as 



224 KEBLE. 

Fellows of the same college. " Round the fire of the 
Oriel Common Room," we are told, " there were 
learned and able, not rarely subtle and disputatious 
conversations, in which this lad of nineteen was called 
to take his part. Amid these he sometimes yearned 
for the more easy, yet not unintellectual society of his 
old friends at Corpus." He found, no doubt, that 
undergraduate days are more congenial to warm friend- 
ships than the highly rarefied atmosphere of an intel- 
lectual Common Room. Where men touch chiefly by 
the head, they find that this is the seat as frequently 
of a repulsive as of an attractive force. While he was 
an undergraduate y and during the early days of his 
fellowship, he wrote a good many beautiful little poems, 
which surviving friends still possess, and the year after 
his election to Oriel he gained the University prizes 
for the English and Latin essay. 

The interval from 1810 to 1815 he spent in Oriel, 
taking part in college tuition, and acting as an exam- 
iner in the Degree Schools. Was it some time during 
these years, or at a later date, that the incident re- 
corded by Dr. Newman took place ? " When one day 
I was walking in High Street, with my dear earliest 
friend, with what eagerness did he cry out, ' There's 
Keble ! ' and with what awe did I look at him ! Then 
at another time I heard a Master of Arts of my col- 
lege give an account, how he had just then had occa- 
sion to introduce himself on some business to Keble, 
and how gentle, courteous, and unaffected Keble had 
been, so as almost to put him out of countenance. 
Then, too, it was reported, truly or falsely, how a 
rising man of brilliant reputation, the present Dean of 
St. Paul's, Dr. Milman, admired and loved him, adding 
that somehow he was strangely unlike any one else." 

In 1815 he was ordained Deacon, the following year 



KEBLE. 225 

Priest ; soon afterwards he left the University, and 
never again permanently resided there. He had 
chosen the calling of a clergyman, and though within 
that field other paths more gratifying to ambition lay 
open to him, he turned aside from them, and gave 
himself to parochial work as the serious employment 
of his life. He became his father's curate, and lived 
with him at Fairford, engaged in this duty for twenty 
years, more or less. This rare absence or restraint of 
ambition, where it might have seemed natural or even 
right to have gratified it, was quite in keeping with 
Keble's whole character. " The Church," says Sir 
J. Coleridge, " he had deliberately chosen to be his 
profession, and he desired to follow out that in a 
country cure. With this he associated, and scarcely 
placed on a lower level, the affectionate discharge of 
his duties as a son and brother. Calls, temporary calls 
of duty to his college and University, for' a time and at 
intervals diverted him (he was again Public Examiner 
from 1821 to 1823) ; but he always kept these outlines 
in view, and as the occasion passed away, reverted to 
them with the permanent devotion of his heart. 
Traces of this feeling may be found again and again in 
< The Christian Year.' " 

This book was first given to the world on the 23d 
of June, 1827, when Keble was- in his thirty-fifth year. 
This, the great work of his life, which will keep his 
name fresh in men's memory when all else that he has 
done shall be forgotten, had been the silent gathering 
of years. Single poems had been in his friends' hands 
at least as early as 1819. They had urged him to 
complete the series, and by 1827 this was done. No 
record of the exact time when each poem was written 
has yet appeared. I should imagine that more of them 
were composed at Fairford than at Oxford. The dis- 
15 



226 KEBLE. 

cussion and criticism natural to a University are not 
generally favorable to poetic creation of any kind, 
least of all to so meditative a strain as that of Keble. 
But it may have been that in this, as in other things, 
he was "unlike any one else." It was only at the 
urgent entreaty of his friends that he published the 
little book. He was not anxious about poetic fame, 
and never thought that these poems would secure it. 
His own plan was " to go on improving the series all 
his life, and leave it to come out, if judged useful, only 
when he should be fairly out of the way." Had this 
plan been acted on, how many thousands would have 
been defrauded of the soothing delight these poems 
have ministered to them! But even those who most 
strongly counseled the publication, little dreamt what 
a destiny was in store for that little book. Of course, 
if the author had kept it by him he might have 
smoothed away some of its defects, but who knows 
how much it might have lost too in the process ? " No 
one," we are told, " knew its literary shortcomings 
better than the author himself. Wisely, and not in 
pride, or through indolence, he abandoned the attempt 
at second-hand to amend this inharmonious line, or 
that imperfect rhyme, or the instances here and there 
in which his idea may be somewhat obscurely ex- 
pressed. Wordsworth's acute poetical sense recognized 
such faults ; yet the book was his delight." Probably 
it was a wise resolve. All emendation of poetry long 
after its first composition runs the risk of spoiling it. 
The author has to take up in one mood what was 
originally conceived in another. His first warm feel- 
ing of the sentiment has gone cold, and he cannot at a 
later time revive it. This is true of all poetry, more 
especially of that which deals with subtle and evanes- 
cent emotions which can never perhaps recur exactly 



KEBLE. 227 

in the same form. Once only in a lifetime may he 
succeed in catching — 

" Those brief unisons which on the brain 
One tone that never can recur has cast, 
One accent never to return again." 

In 1833 Keble was appointed Professor of Poetry 
at Oxford. The Statutes then required the Professor 
to give two or three lectures a year in Latin. The 
ancient language was required to be spoken from this 
chair longer than from any other, probably from fear 
of the trash men might talk if fairly unmuzzled. 
However prudent this may have been when a merely 
average functionary held the chair, it is greatly to be 
regretted that when it was filled by a true poet, who 
was intent on speaking the secret of his own art, he 
should have been so formidably weighted. The pres- 
ent 1 gifted occupant of that chair has fortunately been 
set free, and has vindicated the newly acquired freedom 
by enriching our literature with the finest poetical criti- 
cism it has received since the days of Coleridge. But 
Keble had to work in trammels. He was the last man 
to rebel against any limitations imposed by the wisdom 
or unwisdom of our ancestors. Faithfully he buckled 
himself to the task of translating into well-rounded 
Latin periods his cherished thoughts on his own favor- 
ite subject. Of the theory of poetry embodied in the 
two volumes of his published lectures, something may 
yet be said. The Latin is easy and unconstrained, the 
thought original and suggestive — a great contrast to 
the more than Ciceronian paragraphs of his predeces- 
sor Copleston, bristling as they do to a marvel with 
epigrammatic Latinity, but underneath that containing 
little that is not commonplace. 

i This ought now to be " the late gifted occupant," as it refers to Mr. 
Matthew Arnold. 



228 KEBLE. 

There was another duty which fell to Keble as Pro- 
fessor of Poetry, — to choose the subject for the an- 
nual Prize Poem at Oxford, to adjudicate along with 
others the prize to the best of the poems given in, and 
to look over and suggest corrections in the verses of 
the successful competitor. Of all these winners of the 
Newdigate Prize one only has described his interview 
with Keble, but he one of the most distinguished. 
Dean Stanley, who gained the Newdigate Prize in, I 
think, 1837, with his beautiful poem on "The Gypsies," 
thus describes his first meeting with Keble. By the 
Dean's kind leave I give it in his own words, taken 
from his paper on Keble, now published in " Essays on 
Church and State : " " There are still living those 
with whom his discharge of one of his duties left a far 
livelier recollection than his Latin lectures. It was 
part of his office to correct the poems which during 
his tenure of it obtained the Newdigate Prize. One 
of these young authors still retains so fresh and so 
characteristic a remembrance of his intercourse with 
the Professor, even then venerable in his eyes, that it 
may be worth recording. He recalls, after the lapse 
of more than thirty years, the quiet kindness of man- 
ner, the bright twinkling eye illuminating that other- 
wise inexpressive countenance, which greeted the 
bashful student on his entrance into the Professor's 
presence. One touch after another was given to the 
juvenile verses, substituting for this or that awkward 
phrase graceful turns of expression all his own : — 
" l Is there a spot where earth's dim daylight Ms,' 

has the delicate color of ' The Christian Year ■ all 
over. In adding the expression — 

" * Where shade, air, waters ' — 

he dwelt with all the ardor of the keenest critic on the 



KEBLE. 229 

curious subtlety of language, by which ' water ' sug- 
gests all that is prosaic, and i waters ' all that is poet- 
ical. 

" * The heavens all gloom, the wearied earth all crime ; ■ 

how powerfully does this embody the exhaustion of 

Europe in the fifteenth century ! ' The storied Sphinx,' 

' India's ocean-floods ; ' how vivid are these glances at 

the phenomena of the East! 

1 The wandering Israelite, from year to year, 
Sees the Redeemer's conquering wheels draw near ; " 

how thoroughly here is Southey's language caught from 
the i Curse of Kehama ; ' how thoroughly, too, the 
Judaic as contrasted with the Christian Advent! And 
it may be added, though not directly bearing on the 
present topic, how delighted was his youthful hearer to 
perceive the sympathetic warmth with which, at a cer- 
tain point in the poem, he said, 'Ah, surely this was 
suggested by Dr. Arnold's sermon on " The Egyptians 
whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see no more again 
forever." ' This allusion was the more felt as showing 
his recollection of the friend from whom at that time 
he was so strangely alienated." 

In a foot-note Dean Stanley adds that " on glancing 
at a note to this poem, which cited from Tennyson's 
' Palace of Art,' but without naming the poet, the line 
" i Who shuts love out shall be shut out from love,' 

Keble remarked ' Shakespeare.' The Laureate will 
forgive this ignorance of his early fame in considera- 
tion of the grandeur of the comparison." 

In this vivid description one thing Dean Stanley 
has refrained from giving, the "certain point in his 
poem" which Keble recognized as suggested by Dr. 
Arnold's sermon. But the lines are too good to be 
thus passed over. Taking the view of the Gypsies, 



230 KEBLE. 

as having had their original home in Egypt, the 
thought occurs to the young poet, that they and the 
Jews during their Egyptian sojourn must have met. 
And then he bursts into these fine lines, full of his 
own pictorial genius : — 

" Long since ye parted by the Red Sea strand, 
Now face to face ye meet in every land, 
Aliens amidst a new-born world to dwell, 
Egypt's lorn people, outcast Israel." 

"With slight interruptions Keble continued to live 
with his father at Fairford, and to assist him as his 
curate till 1835. "In that year this tie was broken. 
At the very commencement of it the venerable old 
man, who to the last retained the full use of his facul- 
ties, was taken to his rest ; and before the end of it 
Keble became the Vicar of Hursley, and the husband 
of Miss Charlotte Clarke, second daughter of an old 
college friend of his father's, who was incumbent of a 
parish in the neighborhood of Fairford. This was 
the happy settlement of his life. For himself he had 
now no ungratified wish, and the bonds then tied were 
loosened only by death." 

Only two years before Keble left Fairford, and at 
the very time when he entered on his Poetry Profes- 
sorship, began what is called the Oxford Movement. 
Of this, Dr. Newman tells us, Keble was the real 
author. Let us cast a glance back, and see how it 
arose, and what it aimed at. With what feelings New- 
man, when an undergraduate, looked at Keble, we 
have seen. Some years afterwards, it must have been 
in 1819 or 1820, Newman was elected to the. Oriel 
Fellowship which Arnold vacated. Of that time he 
thus writes : " I had to hasten to the Tower to re- 
ceive the congratulations of all the Fellows. I bore 



KEBLE. 231 

it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed 
and unworthy of the honor done me, that I seemed 
quite desirous of sinking into the ground. His had 
been the first name I had heard spoken of with rever- 
ence rather than admiration when I came up to Ox- 
ford." This was probably the first meeting of these 
two. " When I was elected Fellow of Oriel," Dr. 
Newman continues, " Keble was not in residence, and 
he was shy of me for years, in consequence of the 
marks I bore upon me of the evangelical and liberal 
schools. Hurrell Froude brought us together about 
1828. It is one of his sayings preserved in his Re- 
mains : ' If I was ever asked what good deed I had 
ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and 
Newman to understand each other.' " The friendship 
thus cemented was to be fruitful of results for England. 
It naturally occurs to ask, How far is " The Christian 
Year " identified with the principles of the Tractarian 
movement ? On the one hand, " The Christian Year " 
was published in 1827 ; the movement did not begin 
till 1833. The former, therefore, cannot be regarded 
as in any way a child of the latter. And this accounts 
for what has often been remarked, how little of the 
peculiar Tractarian teaching appears in these poems. 
On the other hand, it is easy to see how the same na- 
ture which, in a season of quiet, when controversy was 
at a lull, shaped out of its own musings " The Chris- 
tian Year," would, when confronted with opposing 
tendencies, and forced into a dogmatic attitude, find 
its true expression in the Tractarian theory. Keble 
was by nature a poet, living by intuition, not by rea- 
soning ; intuition born of, fed by, home affection, tra- 
dition, devout religion. His whole being leaned on 
authority. " Keble was a man who guided himself," 
says Dr. Newman, " and formed his judgments, not by 



232 KEBLE. 

processes of reason, by inquiry or argument, but, to 
use the word in a broad sense, by authority." And 
by authority in its broad sense he means conscience, 
the Bible, the Church, antiquity, words of the wise, 
hereditary lessons, ethical truths, historical memories. 
" It seemed to me as if he felt ever happier when he 
could speak and act under some such primary and 
external sanction ; and could use argument mainly as 
a means of recommending or explaining what had 
claims on his reception prior to proof. What he 
hated instinctively was heresy, insubordination, resist- 
ance to things established, claims of independence, dis- 
loyalty, innovation, a critical or censorious spirit." 
Keble then lived by authority, and hated the disposi- 
tions that oppose it. There is a temper of mind which 
lives by denying authority — a temper whose essence, 
or at least whose bad side, is to foster these very dis- 
positions which he hated. With that tone of mind, 
and the men possessed by it, sooner or later he must 
needs have come into collision. For such a collision, 
Oxford did not want materials. 

During Keble's time of residence, and after he went 
down, the University had been awakening from a long 
torpor, and entering on a new era. " The march of 
the mind," as it was called, was led by a number of 
active-minded and able men, whose chief rallying point 
was Oriel Common Room, whose best representative 
was Whately. These men had set themselves to raise 
the standard of teaching and discipline in the Colleges 
and in the University. They were the University Re- 
formers of their day, and to them Oxford, when first 
arousing itself from long intellectual slumber, owed 
much. As they had a common aim, to raise the intel- 
lectual standard, they were naturally much thrown 
together, and became the celebrities of the place. 



KEBLE. 233 

Those who did not belong to their party thought them 
not free from " pride of reason," an expression then, 
as now, derided by those who think themselves intel- 
lectual, but not the less on that account covering a 
real meaning. It is, as it has been called, " the moral 
malady " which besets those who live mainly by intel- 
lect. Men who could not in heart go along with 
them thought they carried liberty of thought into pre- 
sumption and rationalism. They seemed to submit 
the things of faith too much to human judgment, and 
to seek to limit their religious belief by their own pow- 
ers of understanding. They seemed then, as now, 
" to halve the gospel of God's grace," accepting the 
morality, and, if not rejecting, yet making little of the 
supernatural truths out of which that morality springs. 
Such at least was the judgment of their opponents. 
In the presence of men of this stamp, energetic but 
hard, upright but not over humble or reverent, a man 
of deep religious seriousness, like Keble, instinctively 
" shrank into himself." " He was young in years when 
he became a University celebrity, and younger in 
mind. He had the purity and simplicity of a child. 
He had few sympathies with the intellectual party, 
who sincerely welcomed him as a brilliant specimen 
of young Oxford. He instinctively shut up before 
literary display, and pomp, and donnishness, faults 
which will always beset academical notabilities. He 
did not respond to their advances. ' Poor Keble,' 
Hurrell Froude used gravely to say, 'he was asked 
to join the aristocracy of talent, but he soon found his 
own level.' He went into the country, but he did not 
lose his place in the minds of men because he was out 
of sight." It could not be that Keble and these men 
could really be in harmony, — they, " sons of Auf- 
klarung," men of mere understanding, bringing ail 



234 KEBLE. 

things to the one touchstone of logic and common 
sense, and content with this ; he, a child of faith, with 
more than half his nature in the unseen, and looking 
at things visible mainly as they shadow forth and re- 
veal the invisible. They represented two opposite 
sides of human nature, sides in all but some rare 
instances antagonistic, and never seemingly more an- 
tagonistic that now. Dr. Arnold, indeed, though be- 
longing in the main to the school of liberalism, com- 
bined with it more religious warmth than was common 
in his own party. It is this union of qualities, gener- 
ally thought incompatible, which perhaps was the main 
secret of his great influence. But the combination 
which was almost unique in himself, he can hardly be 
said, by his example, to have rendered more easy for 
his followers in the present day. 

The Catholic Emancipation was a trying and per- 
plexing time for Keble. With the opponents of the 
measure in Oxford, the old Tory party of Church and 
State, he had no sympathy. He saw that they had no 
principle of growth in them, that their only aim was to 
keep things as they were. His sympathy for the old 
Catholic religion, that feeling which had made him say 
in " The Christian Year," 

" Speak gently of our sister's fall," 

would naturally make him wish to see Catholic disabili- 
ties removed. But then he disliked both the men by 
whom, and the arguments by which, Emancipation was 
supported. He would rather have not seen the thing 
done at all, than done by the hands of Whiggery. A 
few years more brought on the crisis, the inevitable 
collision. The Earl Grey Administration, flushed with 
their great Reform victory, went on to lay hands on 
the English Church, that Church which for centuries 



KEBLE. 235 

had withstood the Whigs. They made their attack on 
the weakest point, the Irish Church, and suppressed 
ten of its bishoprics. This might seem to be but a small 
matter in itself, but it was an indication of more be- 
hind. Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set their 
house in order, and his party generally spoke of the 
Church as the mere creature of the State, which they 
might do with as they pleased. The Church must be 
liberalized, those last fangs must be pulled which had 
so often proved troublesome to Whiggery. This was 
too much for Keble. It touched him to the qnick, and 
made him feel that now the time was come when he 
must speak and act. By nature he was no politician 
nor controversialist. He disliked the strife of tongues. 
But he was a man ; he had deep religious convictions ; 
and to change what was ancient and catholic in the 
Church was to touch the apple of his eye. When he 
looked to the old Tory party he saw no help in them. 
To the aggressive spirit they had nothing to oppose but 
outworn Church and State theories. The Bishops too 
were helpless, and spoke slightingly of apostolic succes- 
sion and the Nonjurors. Was the Establishment prin- 
ciple, then, the only rock on which the Church was 
built? Keble and his young friends thought scorn of 
that. This feeling first found utterance in the assize 
sermon which Keble preached from the University pul- 
pit, on Sunday the 14th of July, 1833, and afterwards 
published under the title of " National Apostasy." " I 
have ever considered and kept the day," says Dr. New- 
man, " as the start of the religious movement of 1833." 
That sermon itself I have not seen, but the tone of it 
may be gathered from those lines in the " Lyra Apos- 
tolica ," in which Keble thus brands the spoliators : — 

" Is there no sound about our altars heard 
Of gliding forms that long have watched in vain 



23 G KEBLE. 

For slumbering discipline to break her chain, 
And aim the bolt by Theodosius feared ? 
'Let us depart; ' these English souls are seared, 
Who for one grasp of perishable gold, 
Would brave the curse by holy men of old 
Laid on the robbers of the shrines they reared ; 
Who shout for joy to see the ruffian band 
Come to reform, where ne'er they came to pray, 
E'en where, unbidden, seraphs never trod. 
Let us depart, and leave the apostate land 
To meet the rising whirlwind as she may, 
Without her guardian Angels and her God.'* 

" Robbers of the shrines," " the ruffian band, come 
to reform, where ne'er they came to pray," that was 
the trumpet-note which rallied to the standard of the 
Church whatever of ardor and devotion young Oxford 
then contained. These virtues had never been greatly 
countenanced in the Church of England. To staid 
respectability it has always been, and still is, one of the 
chief recommendations of that Church, that it is an 
embodied protest against what one of its own Bishops 
is said to have denounced as " that most dangerous of 
all errors — enthusiasm." In the last century she had 
cast out enthusiasm in the person of Wesley ; at the 
beginning of this, she had barely tolerated it in the 
Newtons and Cecils, and other fathers of evangelicism. 
But here was a fresh attempt to reintroduce it in a new 
form. The young men who were roused by Keble's 
note of warning — able, zealous, resolute — flung 
aside with disdain timid arguments from expediency. 
They longed to do battle with that most prosaic of all 
political theories, Whiggery, and to smite to the ground 
the spirit of compromise which had so long paralyzed 
the Church of England. They set themselves to de- 
fend the Church with weapons of ethereal temper, and 
they found them, as they believed, in reviving her 
claims to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative. 



KEBLE. 237 

That these claims sounded strange to the ears even of 
Churchmen at that time was to these men no stum- 
bling-block — rather an incentive to more fearless ac- 
tion. True, such a course shut them out from prefer- 
ment, hitherto the one recognized aim of the abler 
English Churchmen. But these younger men were 
content to do without preferment. They had at least 
got beyond that kind of worldliness. If self still 
clung to them in any shape, it was in that enlarged and 
nobler form in which it is one with the glory of the 
Church Catholic in all ages. The views and aims of 
the new party soon took shape, in the " Tracts for the 
Times." If Keble was the starter of the movement, 
John Henry Newman soon became its leader. In all 
his conduct of it, one of his great aims was to give to 
the sentiments and views which had originated with 
Keble a consistent logical basis. The sequel all men 
know. The inner working of the movement may be 
read in the "Apologia." 

But deeply as Keble' s heart was in the Oxford 
movement, his place of work was a quiet Hampshire 
parish. When, in 1835, he left the home of his child- 
hood for the vicarage of Hursley, he found a church 
there not at all to his mind. It seems to have been a 
plain, not beautiful, building of flint and rubble. He 
determined to have a new one built — new all but the 
tower — and on this object he employed the profits of 
the many editions of " The Christian Year ; " and when 
the building was finished, his friends, in token of their 
regard for him, filled all the windows with stained 
glass. In the words of Sir J. P. Coleridge, " Here 
daily for the residue of his life, until interrupted by 
the failing health of Mrs. Keble and his own, did he 
minister He had not, in the popular sense, great 



238 KEBLE. 

gifts of delivery ; his voice was not powerful, nor was 
his ear perfect for harmony of sound; but I think it 
was difficult not to be impressed deeply both by his 
reading and his preaching; when he read, you saw that 
he felt, and he made you feel, that he was the servant 
of God, delivering his words ; or leading you, as one 
of like infirmities and sins with your own, in your 
prayer. When he preached it was with an affectionate 
simplicity and hearty earnestness which were very 
moving ; and the sermons themselves were at all times 
full of that abundant Scriptural knowledge which was 
the most remarkable quality in him as a divine ; it has 
always seemed to me among the most striking charac- 
teristics of " The Christian Year." It is well known 
what his belief and feelings were in regard to the 
Sacraments. I remember on one occasion when I was 
present at a christening as godfather, how much he 
affected me, when a consciousness of his sense of the 
grace conferred became present to me. As he kept 
the newly-baptized infant for some moments in his 
arms, he gazed on it intently and lovingly with a tear 
in his eye, and apparently absorbed in the thought 
of the child of wrath become the child of grace. 
Here his natural affections gave clearness and intensity 
to his belief; the fondest mother never loved children 
more dearly than this childless man." 

During the eventful years that followed the Assize 
sermon, though his place was still in his country cure, 
his sympathies and cooperation were with Newman and 
other friends in Oxford. He contributed some of the 
more important Tracts ; poems of his embodying the 
sentiments of the party appeared from time to time, 
and were republished in the " Lyra Apostolica." In 
1841, when the famous No. 90 was published, to the 
scandal of the whole religious world, Keble was one 



KEBLE, 239 

of the few who stood by Newman. What then must 
his feelings have been when that younger friend, by 
whom he had so stood, with whom he had so often 
taken counsel, abandoned the Church of England, and 
sought refuge in that of Rome ? As late as 1863, a 
friend of his, when walking with him near Hursley, 
drew his attention to a broken piece of ground — a 
chalk-pit, as it turned out — hard by. " ' Ah ! ' he 
said, ' that is a sad place, connected with the most 
painful event of my life.' I began to fear that it had 
been the scene of some terrible accident which I had 
unwittingly recalled to his mind. ' It was there,' he 
went on, ' that I first knew for certain that J. H. N. 
had left us. We bad made up our mind that such an 
event was all but inevitable ; and one day I received a 
letter in his handwriting. I felt sure of what it con- 
tained, and I carried it about with me through the day, 
afraid to open it. At last I got away to that chalk- 
pit, and there, forcing myself to read the letter, I found 
that my forebodings had been too true ; it was the an- 
nouncement that he was gone.' " 

It seems natural to ask how it came that, when 
Newman left, Keble adhered to the Church of Eng- 
land. They were at one in their fundamental princi- 
ples. What, then, determined them to go different 
ways ? Of many reasons that occur this one may be 
given. The two friends, though agreeing in their 
principles, differed widely in mental structure and in 
natural temperament. They differed scarcely less in 
training and circumstances. Keble, as we have seen, 
cared little for reasoning, and rested mainly on feeling 
and intuition. Newman, on the other hand, though 
fully alive to these, added an unresting intellectual in- 
stinct which could not be satisfied without a defined 
logical foundation for what it instinctively held. Not 



240 KEBLE. 

that Keble was without a theory. Taking from But- 
ler the principle that probability is the guide of life, he 
applied it to theological truth. Butler, by a very 
questionable process, had employed the maxim of 
worldly prudence, that probability is the guide of life, 
as an argument for religion, but mainly in the natural 
sphere. Keble tried to carry it on into the sphere of 
revealed truth. The arguments which support relig- 
ious doctrine, he said, may be only probable arguments 
judged intellectually ; but faith and love, being di- 
rected towards their divine Object, and living in the 
contemplation of that Object, convert these probable 
arguments into certainties. In fact, the inward assur- 
ance, which devout faith has of the reality of its Ob- 
ject, makes doctrines practically certain which may 
not be intellectually demonstrable. Newman tells us 
that he accepted this view so far, but, not being fully 
satisfied with it, tried, in his University sermons and 
other works, to supplement it with considerations 
of his own. In time, however, he felt it give way in 
his hands, and either abandoned it, or allowed it to 
carry him elsewhere. 

But besides difference of mental structure, there 
were other causes which perhaps determined the diver- 
gent courses of the two friends. In the case of Keble, 
whatever is most sacred and endearing in the English 
Church had surrounded his infancy and boyhood, and 
gone with him into full manhood. With him loyalty 
to Home was hardly less sacred than loyalty to the 
Faith. These two influences were so intertwined in 
the inner fibres of his nature that it would have been 
to him very death to separate them. Of Dr. New- 
man's early associations I know no more than the little 
he has himself disclosed. It would appear, however, 
that the Anglican Church never had so invincible a 



KEBLE. 241 

hold on him as it had on Keble. By few perhaps has 
it been seen in so winning an aspect as it wore in the 
rural quiet of that Gloucestershire parsonage which 
was his early home. 

When Newman was gone, on Keble, along with Dr. 
Pusey, w T as thrown the chief burden of the toil and 
responsibility arising out of his position in the Church. 
Naturally there was great searching of hearts amongst 
all the followers of the Oxford theology. Keble had 
to give himself to counsel the perplexed, to strengthen 
the wavering, and, as far as might be, to heal the 
breaches that had been made. Throughout the eccle- 
siastical contests of the last twenty years, though never 
loud or obtrusive, he yet took a resolute part in main- 
taining the principles with which his life had been 
identified. One last extract from Sir J. T. Coleridge's 
beautiful sketch of his friend, will give all that need 
here be said of this portion of Keble's life : " Cir- 
cumstances had now placed him in a position which he 
would never have desired for himself, but from which a 
sense of duty compelled him not to shrink. Questions 
one after another arose touching the faith or the disci- 
pline of the Church, and affecting, as he believed, the 
morals and religion of the people. I need not specify 
the decisions of courts or the proceedings in Parlia- 
ment to which I allude ; those whose consciences were 
disturbed, but who shrank from public discussion, and 
those who stirred themselves in canvassing their pro- 
priety, or in counteracting their consequences, equally 
turned to him as a comforter and adviser in private 
and in public, and he could not turn a deaf ear to such 
applications. It is difficult to say with what affection- 
ate zeal and industry he devoted himself to such cares, 
how much, and at length it is to be feared how injuri- 
ously to his health, he spent his time and strength in 
16 



242 KEBLE. 

the labor these brought on him. Many of these in- 
volved, of course, questions of law, and it was not 
seldom that he applied to me — and thus I can testify 
with what care and learning and acuteness he wrote 
upon them. Many of his fugitive pieces were thus 
occasioned ; and should these be, as they ought to be, 
collected, they will be found to possess even more than 
temporary interest. I had occasion but lately to 
refer to his tract on ' Marriage with the Wife's Sister/ 
and I can only hope that the question will soon be 
argued in Parliament with the soundness and clearness 
which are there employed. But even all this does not 
represent the calls made on his time by private cor- 
respondence, by personal visits, or, where it was nec- 
essary, by frequent, sometimes by long journeys, taken 
for the support of religion. I need hardly say that his 
manner of doing all this concurred in raising up for 
him that immense personal influence which he pos- 
sessed ; people found in their best adviser the most 
unpresuming, unwearied, affectionate friend, and they 
loved as well as venerated him." 

The appearance of Dr. Newman's "Apologia" in 
1864 was to Keble a great joy. Not that he had ever 
ceased to love Dr. Newman with his old affection, but 
the separation of now nearly twenty years, and the 
cause of it, had been to Keble the sorest trial of his 
life. If the book contained some things regarding the 
Church of England which must have pained Keble, 
there was much more in it to gladden him ; not only 
the entire human-heartedness of its tone, which made 
its way to the hearts even of strangers, but the deep 
and tender affection which it breathes to Dr. Newman's 
early friends, and the proof it gave that Rome had 
made no change either in his heart or head which 
could hinder their real sympathy. The result was 



KEBLE. 243 

that in September, 1865, these three, Dr. Newman, Dr. 
Pusey, and Mr. Keble, met under the roof of Hursley 
vicarage, and after an interval of twenty years looked 
on each others' altered faces. One evening they 
passed together, no more. It happened, however, that 
at the very time of this meeting, Mrs. Keble had an 
alarming attack of illness. Keble writes : " He (Dr. 
Pusey) and J. H. N. met here the very day after my 
wife's attack. Pusey indeed was present when the 
attack began. Trying as it all was, I was very glad to 
have them here, and to sit by them and listen." 

Soon after this, in October, Mr. and Mrs. Keble left 
Hursley for Bournemouth, not to return. Since the 
close of 1864, symptoms of declining health had shown 
themselves in him also. The long strain of the duties 
that accumulated on him in his later years, with the 
additional anxiety caused by Mrs. Keble's precarious 
health, had been gradually wearing him. After only a 
few days' illness he was taken to his rest on the day 
before Good Friday, 1866. In a few weeks Mrs. 
Keble followed, and now they are laid side by side in 
Hursley churchyard. 

The picture of this saintly life will of course in time 
be given to the world. It is much to be hoped that 
the task will be intrusted to some one able to do justice 
to it. There are two kinds of biographies, and of each 
kind we have seen examples in our own time. One is 
as a golden chalice, held up by some wise hand, to 
gather the earthly memory ere it is spilt on the ground. 
The other kind is as a millstone, hung by a partial, yet 
ill-judging friend, round the hero's neck, to plunge him 
as deep as possible in oblivion. In looking back on the 
eminent men of last generation, we have seen one or 
two lives of the former stamp, many more of the latter. 
Let us indulge the hope that he who writes of Keble 



244 KEBLE. 

will take for his model the one or two nearly faultless 
biographies we possess, and above all that he will con- 
dense his work within such limits as shall commend it 
not only to partial friends, but also to all thoughtful 
readers. 

By his character and influence, Keble did more than 
perhaps any other man to bring about the most wide- 
spread quickening of religious life which has taken place 
within the English Church during the present century. 
To him, and the party to which his very name was a 
tower of strength, England owes two great services. 
First, they, and they preeminently, have turned, and 
are still turning, a resolute front against the rationaliz- 
ing spirit, which would pare down revelation to the 
measure of the human understanding — cut away its 
foundation in the supernatural, and virtually reduce it 
to a moral system, encased perhaps in a few historic 
facts. Secondly, they have introduced into the English 
Church a higher order of character, and taught it, one 
might almost say, new virtues. They have diffused 
widely through the clergy the contagion of their own 
zeal and resoluteness, their self-devotion and Christian 
chivalry. These are high services to have rendered to 
any country in any age. But with these acknowledg- 
ments two regrets must mingle : one, that with their 
defense of Christian truth they should have mixed up 
positions which are untenable, identifying with the 
simple faith doctrines which are no part of it, but rather 
alien accretions gathered by the Church in its progress 
down the ages. The result of this intermingling with 
Christianity things that seem superstitious, has been to 
drive many back into dislike and denial of that which 
is truly supernatural. The other cause of regret is, that 
they should have impaired the practical power of their 
example by the exclusive and unsympathetic side they 



I 



KEBLE. 245 

have turned towards their fellow- Christians in other 
Reformed communions. This exclusiveness kept back 
from the Oxford theologians the sympathies of manp- 
who, but for this, would have been strongly drawn tc 
them by their unworldliness, fervor, and self-devotion. 
Both errors have one source, the confounding the 
Church with the clergy, or rather, perhaps I should 
say, the attempt to place the essence of the Church in 
a priestly organization. But though these things must 
be said, it is not as of a partisan that one would like 
most to think of Keble. The circumstances of his time 
forced him to take a side, but his nature was too pure 
and holy to find fit expression in polemics ; and the 
memory of his rare and saintly character will long sur- 
vive in the hearts of his countrymen the party strifes 
in which it was his lot to mingle. 

Of his two prose books, his edition of Hooker's 
works, which has, I believe, superseded every other, 
and his Life of the good Bishop Wilson of Sodor and 
Man, the author of the " Sacra Privata," this is not the 
place to speak. But before turning to " The Christian 
Year," one word must be said about his later book of 
poetry, the " Lyra Innocentium." It appeared in 1846, 
at an interval of nearly twenty years after " The Chris- 
tian Year." This collection of poems he speaks of in 
May, 1845, as "a set of things which have been ac- 
cumulating on me for the last three or four years. It 
has been a great comfort to me in the desolating 
anxiety of the last two years, and I wish I could settle 
at once on some other such work." Children, as we 
have seen, had always been peculiarly dear to this 
childless man, and he had at first wished to have made 
these poems a Christian Year for teachers and nurses, 
and others much employed about children. In time it 



246 KEBLE. 

took a different shape, and it is perhaps to be regretted 
that he had not made it what he first intended. Chil- 
dren, their thoughts and ways, and the feelings which 
they awaken in their elders, are themes of quite ex- 
haustless interest. And yet how seldom has any poet 
of adequate tenderness and depth approached that 
mysterious world of childhood! Wordsworth, indeed, 
has felt it deeply, and expressed it in some of his most 
exquisite poems : — 

" dearest, dearest boy, my heart 

For better lore would seldom yearn, 
Could I but teach the hundredth part 
Of what from thee I learn." 

This verse from Wordsworth is indeed the motto chosen 
by Keble for his " Lyra Innocentium." 

Of the poems on children which the " Lyra " contains, 
I am free to confess that they approach their subject 
too exclusively from the Church side for general in- 
terest. " Looking Westward," " The Bird's Nest," 
" Bereavement," " The Manna Gatherers," are fine 
lyrics, equal perhaps to most in " The Christian Year." 
But there is no thought in the " Lyra Innocentium " 
about childhood that comes near that earlier strain in 
which the poet, as he looks on children ranged to re- 
ceive their first lessons in religion, bursts forth — 

"O! say not, dream not, heavenly notes 
To childish ears are vain, 
That the young mind at random floats, 
And cannot reach the strain. 

" Dim or unheard, the words may fall, 
And yet the heaven-taught mind 
May learn the sacred air, and all 
The harmony unwind. 

" Was not our Lord a little child, 

Taught by degrees to pray, 

By father dear and mother mild 

Instructed day by day? " 



KEBLE. 247 

Then, after an interval, he goes on — 

" Each little voice in turn 
Some glorious truth proclaims, 
What sages would have died to learn, 
Kow taught by cottage dames. 

" And if some tones be false or low, 
What are all prayers beneath 
But cries of babes that cannot know 
Half the deep thought they breathe? " 

Whatever the reason may be, certainly the later 
book does not strike home to the universal heart as 
" The Christian Year " did, and it never has attained 
anything like the same popularity. 

The reference to ecclesiastical usages, not known to 
the many, and the more pronounced High Church feel- 
ing which it embodies, will partly account for this. It 
is certainly much more restricted and less catholic in 
its range. Partly also it may be that the fountain of 
inspiration did not flow so fully as in earlier years. It 
may not have been that time had chilled it ; but other 
duties and cares had come thick upon him since his po- 
etic spring-time. Especially the polemical stir in which 
his share in the Oxford movement had involved him, 
and the anxiety in the midst of which the " Lyra Inno- 
centium " was composed, must have left little of that 
leisure either of time or heart which is necessary for a 
free-flowing minstrelsy. 

It may help to the fuller understanding of "The 
Christian Year," if we turn for a moment to Keble's 
theory of poetry. He has set it forth at large in 
" Preelections on Poetry," more shortly in his review of 
the " Life of Scott," which, once famous in Oxford, is al- 
most unknown to the present generation. That review, 
which first appeared in the " British Critic," is well wor- 
thy of being republished, both from the insight it gives 



248 KEBLE. 

into Keble's character, and views on poetry, and also as 
a study of Scott by a reverential admirer, in many thiDgs 
very unlike himself. The theory is that poetry is the 
natural relief of minds burdened by some engrossing 
idea, or strong emotion, or ruling taste, or imaginative 
regret, which from some cause or other they are kept 
from directly indulging. Rhythm and metrical form 
serve to regulate and restrain, while they express those 
strong or deep emotions, " which need relief, but cannot 
endure publicity." They are at once " vent for eager 
feelings and a veil to draw over them. For the utter- 
ance of high or tender feeling controlled and modified 
by a certain reserve is the very soul of poetry." 

On this principle Keble founds what he regards as 
an essential distinction between primary and secondary 
poets. Primary poets are they who are driven by some 
overmastering enthusiasm, by passionate devotion to 
some range of objects, or line of thought, or aspect of 
life or nature, to utter their feelings in song. They 
sing, because they cannot help it. There is a melody 
within them which will out, a fire in their blood which 
cannot be suppressed. This is the true poetic /xavta of 
which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged 
to poetry by any such overflowing sentiment ; but 
learning, admiration of great masters, choice, and a cer- 
tain literary turn, have made them poetic artists. They 
were not born, but being possessed of a certain €v<£ma, 
have made themselves poets. Of the former kind are 
Homer, Lucretius, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott ; of the 
latter, Euripides, Dryden, Milton. This view, if it be 
somewhat too narrow a basis on which to found a com- 
prehensive theory of poetry, certainly does lay hold of 
one side of the truth generally overlooked. In our 
own day, how many are there! possessed of a large 
measure of artistic faculty, able to treat poetically any- 



KEBLE. 249 

thing they take up, wanting only in one thing, — a 
subject which absorbs their interest. There is nothing 
in human life, or history, or nature, which they have 
made peculiarly their own, nothing about which they 
know more intimately, than the host of educated men. 
And so, though with a " skill in composition and felicity 
of language " greater than many poets possess, they 
are still felt to be literary men rather than poets, be- 
" cause they have no overmastering impulse, no divine 
enthusiasm, driving them to seek relief in song. 

If we apply to himself the author's own canon, " The 
Christian Year " would place him in the rank of pri- 
mary poets. Not that it displays anything like the high- 
est artistic faculty, but because it evidently flows from 
a native spring of inspiration. As far as it goes, it is 
genuine poetry. The author sings, in a strain of his 
own, of the things he has known and felt and loved. 
Beneath all the layers that early education and Oxford 
training have superimposed, there is felt to be a glow 
of internal heat not derived from these. 

To English Church people without number " The 
Christian Year" has long been not only a cherished 
classic, but a sacred book, which they place beside their 
Bible and their Prayer-Book. On the other hand, a 
generation of literary young men has grown up, who, 
having had their tastes formed on a newer, more highly 
spiced style of poetry, scarcely know " The Christian 
Year," and, if they knew it, would turn away from 
what seemed to them its meagre literary merit. It 
would be impossible to say anything regarding it which 
would not seem faint praise to the one class, and exag- 
geration to the other. But without trying to meet the 
views of either, it is worth while to study the poem for 
ourselves. 



250 KEBLE. 

It cannot be too clearly kept in view that Keble 
is not a hymn writer, and that " The Christian Year " 
is not a collection of hymns. Those who have come 
to it expecting to find genuine hymns, will turn away 
in disappointment. They will seek in vain for any- 
thing of the directness, the fervor, the simplicity, the 
buoyancy of devotion which have delighted them in 
Charles Wesley. But to demand this is to mistake 
the nature and form of Keble's poems. There is all 
the difference between them and Charles Wesley's, 
that there is between meditation on the one hand, and 
prayer, or thanksgiving, or praise on the other. Indeed, 
so iittle did Keble's genius fit him for hymn writing, 
that in his two poems which are intended to be hymns 
— those for the morning and the evening — the open- 
ing in either case is a description of natural facts, 
wholly unsuited to hymn purposes. And so when 
these two poems are adopted into hymn collections, as 
they often are, a mere selection of certain stanzas from 
each is all that has been found possible. Besides these 
two, there is no other poem in the book, any large 
part of which can be used as a hymn. For they are 
all lyrical religious meditations, not hymns at all. Yet 
true though this is, every here and there, out of the 
midst of the reflections, there does flash a verse of 
fervid emotion and direct heart-appeal to God, which 
is quite hymnal in character. These occasional bursts 
are among the highest beauties of "The Christian 
Year." Yet they are neither so frequent nor so long- 
sustained as to change the prevailingly meditative cast 
of the whole book. It is owing perhaps to this preva- 
lence of meditation, and that often of a refined and 
subtle kind, that " The Christian Year " is not, as we 
have often heard said, so well adapted as some simpler, 
less poetical collections, to be read by the sick-bed to 



KEBLE. 251 

the faint and weak. Unless long familiarity has made 
it easy, it requires more thought and mental elasticity 
to follow it, than the sick for the most part can supply. 
Yet it contains single verses, many, though not whole 
poems, which will come home full of consolation to 
any, even the weakest spirit. On the whole, however, 
it is not with Charles Wesley, or any of the hymn 
writers of this or the past century, nor even with 
Cowper in his hymns or his larger poems, that Keble 
should be compared. In outward form, and not a 
little in inward spirit, the religious poets to whom he 
bears the strongest likeness are Henry Yaughan and 
George Herbert, both of the seventeenth century. A 
comparison with these would be interesting, were this 
the place for it, but at present I must confine myself 
to the consideration of the special characteristics of 
" The Christian Year." 

These seem to be, first, a tone of religious feel- 
ing, fresh, deep, and tender, beyond what was common 
even among religious men in the author's day, perhaps 
in any day ; secondly, great intensity and tenderness 
of home affection ; thirdly, a shy and delicate reserve, 
which loved quiet paths and shunned publicity ; 
fourthly, a pure love of nature, and a spiritual eye to 
read nature's symbolism. 

" He sang of love, with quiet blending, 
Slow to begin, and never ending, 
Of serious faith, and inward glee." 

1. Its peculiar tone of religious feeling. 

It embodies deep and tender religious sentiment in 
a form which is old, and yet new. Our best critic has 
lately told us that "the inevitable business for the 
modern poet, as it was for the Greek poet in the days 
of Pericles, is to interpret human life afresh, and find 
a new spiritual basis for it." Keble did not think so. 



252 KEBLE. 

He was content with the interpretation which Chris- 
tianity has put on human life, and wished only to read 
man and nature as far as he might, in this light. 
Goethe, I suppose, is the great modern instance of a 
poet who has tried " to give a moral interpretation of 
man and the world from an independent point of view." 
Of course it would be simply ridiculous for a moment 
to place Keble for poetic power in comparison with 
such an one as Goethe. But, disparate as their powers 
are, Keble with limited faculty, just by virtue of his 
having accepted the Christian interpretation, while the 
other rejected it, has spoken, if one may venture to 
say so, more words that satisfy man's deepest yearn- 
ings, that sink into those simple places of the heart 
which lie beneath all culture, than Goethe with all his 
world-width has done. The religion which Keble laid 
to heart, and lived by, would not seem to have come 
to him through prolonged spiritual conflicts, as did 
that of the great Puritans ; neither had he reached it 
by laborious critical processes, as modern philosophers 
would have us do. He had learned it first at his 
mother's knee. Then it was confirmed and system- 
atized by the daily teaching of the Church he so de- 
voutly loved. Time brought to it additions from va- 
rious quarters, but no break. The powerful influences 
of his University, direct and indirect, chivalry reawak- 
ening in Scott's poetry, meditative depth in Words- 
worth, these all melted naturally into his primal faith, 
and combined with the general tendencies of the time 
to carry him in spirit back to those older ages where 
his imagination found ampler range, his devotion se- 
verer, more self-denying virtues than modern life en- 
genders. Out of that great past he brought some of 
the sterner stuff of which the martyrs were made, and 
introduced it like iron into the blood of modern relig- 



KEBLE. 253 

ious feeling. A poet who received all these influ- 
ences into himself, and vitalized them, could not but 
make the old new. For not till the authoritative had 
been inwardly transfused into the moral and spiritual 
did it for the most part find vent in his poetry. There 
are exceptions to this, which form what may be set 
down as the shortcomings of " The Christian Year." 
But in all its finer, more vital poems, the catholic faith 
has become personal, rests frankly on intuition and 
experience, as frankly as the vaguer, more impersonal 
meditations of greater poets. 

" The eye in smiles may wander round, 

Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet, 
But for the soul no home is found, 
Save Him who made it, meet." 

Or again, the well-known — 

" Abide with me from morn till eve, 
For without Thee I cannot live; 
Abide with me when night is nigh, 
For without Thee I dare not die." 

Or again — 

" Who loves the Lord aright, 
No soul of man can worthless find j 
All will be precious in his sight, 
Since Christ on all hath shined." 

It is the many words, simple yet deep, devoutly 
Christian yet intensely human, like these, scattered 
throughout its pages, that have endeared " The Chris- 
tian Year" to countless hearts within the English 
Church, and to many a heart beyond it. The new 
elements in the book are perhaps these — first, it 
translates religious sentiment out of the ancient and 
exclusively Hebrew dialect into the language of modern 
feeling. Hitherto English devotional poets, with the 
exception perhaps of Cowper, in some passages, had 
adhered rigorously to the Scriptural imagery and 



254 KEBLE. 

phraseology. This, besides immensely limiting their 
range, made their words often fall wide of modern 
experience. Keble took the thoughts and sentiments 
of which men at the present day are conscious, ex- 
pressed them in fitting modern words, and transfused 
into them the Christian spirit. Secondly, there is 
visible in him, first perhaps of his contemporaries, — 
that which seems the best characteristic of modern 
religion, — combined with devout reverence for the 
person of our Lord, a closer, more personal love to 
Him as to a living friend. There were no doubt rare 
exceptions here and there, but, generally speaking, 
religious men before spoke of our Lord in a more 
distant way, as one holding the central place rather in 
a dogmatic system than in the devout affections. The 
best men of our own time have gone beyond this. 
The Lord of the Gospels, in his Divine humanity, has 
come closer to their, hearts, and made Himself known 
in a more intimate and endearing way. In none 
perhaps was this change of feeling earlier seen, or 
more strongly marked, than in Keble. Thirdly, there 
is the close and abundant knowledge of Scripture, with 
a fine and delicate feeling for the beauty of its language. 
Without confining himself to the imagery or language 
of the Bible, he everywhere shows his intimacy with it, 
and interweaves its words and half sentences, its scenes 
and imagery naturally and gracefully with his own. 

These are some of the more catholic notes of the 
book which have won for it a place in the affections 
of Christians of every communion. This depth of 
catholic religious sentiment, it is, no doubt, which is its 
chief and most valuable characteristic. From this 
some may be ready to draw an argument for Christian 
morality disjoined from Christian doctrine, or for some 
all-embracing religion which would comprehend what- 



KEBLE. 255 

ever the various churches agree in, discarding all in 
which they differ. What that residuum exactly is, no 
one has yet stated. But before drawing such an 
argument from " The Christian Year," it may be as 
well to ask whether that book would have been so 
charged with devout Christian sentiment if its author 
had not held with all his heart those doctrinal truths 
which were in him the roots out of which that senti- 
ment grew, but which many now wish to get rid of ? 
If we love the consummate flower, it might be as well 
not to begin by cutting away the root. 

There is, however, another side on which " The 
Christian Year " is less catholic in its character. This, 
which may be called its ecclesiastical side, is inherent 
in the very form of the book. A poem for each Sun- 
day in the year would be welcome to very many, but 
then what is to determine the subject of each Sunday's 
poem? A chance verse or phrase in the Gospel for 
the day, as this is given in the Prayer-Book, is hardly 
a catholic or universal ground for fixing the subject. 
Again, Christmas, Good Friday, Easter-day, Whitsun- 
day, have of course a catholic meaning, because these 
days, though not observed by all churches, are yet 
memorials of the sacred facts by which all Christians 
live. But the lesser Saints' Days, Circumcision, Puri- 
fication, as well as the occasional services, have a local 
and temporary, not a universal import. Accordingly, a 
perusal of the poems suggests what the preface to them 
confirms, that they did not all flow off from a free 
spontaneous inspiration, awakened by the thought 
natural to each day, but that a good number were 
either poems previously composed and afterwards 
adapted to some particular Sunday, or written as it 
were to order after the thought of rounding " The 
Christian Year " had arisen. So clear does this seem 



256 KEBLE. 

that it would not be hard to go through the several 
poems and lay finger here on the spontaneous effusions, 
there on those of more labored manufacture. The 
former flow from the first verse to the last lucid in 
thought, simple and almost faultless in diction ; no 
break in the sense, no obscurity ; seldom any harsh- 
ness or poverty in the diction. The others are imper- 
fect in rhythm and language, defaced by the conven- 
tionalities of poetic diction, frequently obscure or 
artificial, the thread of thought broken or hard to 
catch. The one set are like mountain streams, that 
run down the hillside in sunshine, clear and bright 
from end to end, the other are like streams that find 
their way through difficult places, often hidden under- 
ground or buried in heaps of stones. Yet even the 
most defective of them come forth to light in some 
single verse of profound thought or tender feeling, so 
well expressed as to make the reader willingly forgive 
for that one gleam the imperfection of the rest. 

2. Home-feeling. 

The next quality I would notice is the deep tone 
of home affection which pervades these poems. This, 
perhaps as much as anything, has endeared them to his 
home-loving countrymen. Such is that feeling for an 
ancient home breathed in — 

" Since all that is not Heaven must fade, 
Light be the hand of Ruin laid 

Upon the home I love: 
With lulling spell let soft Decay 
Steal on, and spare the giant sway 

The crash of tower and grove. 

" Far opening down some woodland deep 
In their own quiet glade should sleep 

The relics dear to thought, 
And wild-flower wreaths from side to side 
Their waving tracery hang, to hide 

What ruthless Time has wrought." 



KEBLE. 257 

Again, the hymn for St. Andrew's Day is so well 
known and loved as hardly to need quoting. Every 
line of it is instinct with simple pure affection, yet 
never, one might think, so deeply felt or so well ex- 
pressed as here : — 

" When brothers part for manhood's race, 
"What gift may most endearing prove 
To keep fond memory in her place, 
And certify a brother's love ? 

11 Xo fading frail memorial give 

To soothe his soul when thou art gone, 
But wreaths of hope for aye to live, 

And thoughts of good together done." 

Besides the more obvious allusions to the household 
charities, there are many delicate, more reserved 
touches on the same chord. Such is the — 

" I cannot paint to Memory's eye 

The scene, the glance, I dearest love — 
Unchanged themselves, in me they die, 
Or faint, or false, their shadows prove. 



" Meanwhile, if over sea or sky 

Some tender lights unnoticed fleet, 
Or on loved features dawn and die, 
Unread, to us, their lesson sweet ; 

Yet are there saddening sights around, 
Which Heaven, in mercy, spares us too." 

But there is no need to go on with quotations. Many 
more such passages will occur to every reader. High 
education and refined thought in him had not weakened, 
but only made more pure and intense, natural affection. 
Yet in all the tenderness there is no trace of effemi- 
nacy. True, the woman's heart everywhere shows itself. 
But as it has been said that in the countenance of most 
men of genius there is something of a womanly ex- 
pression not seen in the faces of other men, so it ia 
17 



258 KEBLE. 

distinctive of true poetic temper that it ever carries the 
woman's heart within the man's. And certainly, of no 
poet's heart does this hold more truly than of Keble's. 
They, however, must be but blind critics, insensible 
to the finer pathos of human life, who have on this 
account culled Keble's poetry " effeminate." The 
woman's heart in him is blended with the martyr's 
courage. Hardly any modern poetry breathes so firm 
self-control, so fixed yet calm resolve, so stern self- 
denial. If these be qualities that can consist with 
effeminacy, then Keble's poetry may be allowed to 
pass for effeminate. But those who bring this charge 
against it, misled, it may be, by the loud bluster that 
passes with many for manliness, seem to forget that the 
bravest and most high-souled manhood is also the gen- 
tlest and most tender hearted ; that, according to the 
saying, " A man is never so much a man as when he 
becomes most in heart a child." 

3. Reserve. 

This naturally leads on to the notice of another 
characteristic of this poetry — the fine reserve, which 
does not publish aloud, but only delicately hints, its 
deeper feelings. It was an intrinsic part of Keble's 
nature to shrink from obtruding himself, to dislike dis- 
play, — 

" To love the sober shade 
More than the laughing light.'' 

And one object he had in publishing " The Christian 
Year " was the hope that it might supply a sober stand- 
ard of devotional feeling, in unison with that presented 
by the Prayer-Book. The time, he thought, was one 
of unbounded curiosity and morbid craving for excite- 
ment, symptoms which have not abated during the 
forty years since Keble so wrote. He wished, as far 
as might be, to supply some antidote to these tend- 



KEBLE. 259 

encies. Again, modern thought has, as all know, 
turned in upon itself, and discovered a whole internal 
world of reflections and sensibilities hardly expressed 
in the older literature. Keble so far shared this tend- 
ency with his contemporaries. But he set himself 
not to feed and pamper it, but to direct, to sober, and 
to brace it, by bringing it into the presence of realities 
higher than itself. 

This feeling of delicate reserve, sobered and strength- 
ened by Christian thought, comes out in many of the 
poems, in none perhaps more than in the one which 
contains these stanzas : — 

" E'en human Love will shrink from sight 

Here in the coarse rude earth: 

How then should rash intruding glance 

Break in upon her sacred trance 

Who boasts a heavenly birth ? 

" So still and secret is her growth, 
Ever the truest heart, 
Where deepest strikes her kindly root 
For hope or joy, for flower or fruit, 
Least knows its happy part. 

" God only, and good angels, look 

Behind the blissful screen — 

As when, triumphant o'er his woes, 

The Son of God by moonlight rose, 

By all but Heaven unseen." 

I would not pause on verbal criticisms, — only the last 
line of the second stanza here is one of many instances 
in which the beauty of the finest thoughts is marred 
by the admission of some hackneyed conventional 
phrase. Otherwise, these stanzas, as well as the whole 
poem in which they occur, are in Keble's finest and 
most native vein. In keeping with the feeling breathed 
by these lines is another which should be noted. As 
he keeps his own deepest feelings under a close veil of 



260 KEBLE. 

reserve, so he loves best the virtues and the characters 
which are least obtrusive, and generally get least praise. 
Things which the world least recognizes, for these he 
reserves his heart's best sympathy. For the loud, the 
successful, the caressed, he has no word but perhaps 
one of admonition. It is the poor, the bowed down, 
the lonely, the forsaken, who draw out his deepest ten- 
derness. And what makes this the nobler in Keble is, 
that it does not seem to come from the principle of 
haud ignarus mail, but rather from pure strength of 
Christian sympathy. The traits of character for which 
he has the keenest eye, the virtues on which he dwells 
most lovingly, are those which men in general take 
least note of. Those who belong to " the nameless 
family of God " kindle in him a deep enthusiasm, such 
as most poets have reserved for the earth's great he- 
roes. Thus, in one of his finest passages, after con- 
trasting those Christians who live in the " green earth " 
and under the " open sky " of the country, with those 
whose lot is cast in the streets and stifling alleys of the 
crowded city, he bursts forth — 

" But Love's a flower that will not die 
For lack of leafy screen, 
And Christian Hope can cheer the eye 

That ne'er saw vernal green ; 
Then be ve sure that Love can bless 
E'en in this crowded loneliness, 
Where ever-moving myriads seem to say, 
Go — thou art nought to us, nor we to thee — away ! 

" There are in this loud stunning tide 
Of human care and crime, 
With whom the melodies abide 

Of th' everlasting chime; 
Who carry music in their heart 
Through dusty lane and wrangling mart, 
Plying their daily task with busier feet, 
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat." 



KEBLE. 261 

And as is the inward tone of feeling, so is its out- 
ward expression, chastened and subdued. There is no 
gorgeousness of coloring, no stunning sound, no highly 
spiced phrase or metaphor. From what have been the 
chief attractions of much poetry popular since his day, 
— scarlet hues and blare of trumpets, staring metaphors 
and metaphysical enigmas, he turned instinctively. He 
seemed to say to these, — 

" Farewell: for one short life we part: 
I rather woo the soothing art, 
Which only souls in sufferings tried 
Bear to their suffering brethren's side." 

Those who have called other parts of Keble effeminate, 
might perhaps call this ascetic. If it is so, it is an 
asceticism in harmony with true Christianity, and with 
the sober wisdom that comes from life's experience. 

4. Descriptions of Nature. 

Much has been said of Keble's eye for nature. His 
admirers perhaps exaggerate it, his depredators as much 
underrate it. He certainly shared largely in that feel- 
ing about the visible world, so identified with Words- 
worth that it is now called Wordsworthian, — that 
feeling which more than any other marks the direction 
in which modern imagination has enlarged and deep- 
ened. The appearances of nature furnish Keble with 
the framework in which most of his lyrics are set, the 
mould in which they are cast. Some whole poems, as 
the one beginning — 

" Lessons sweet of spring returning," 

are little more than descriptions of some scene in 
nature. Many more take some natural appearance 
and make it the symbol of a spiritual truth. Two 
small rills, born apart and afterwards blending in one 
large stream, are likened to two separate prayers unit- 



262 KEBLE. 

ing to bring about some great result. The autumn 
clouds, mantling round the sun for love, suggest that 
love is life's only sign. The robin singing unweariedly 
in the bleak November wind, suggests a lesson of con- 
tent — 

" Rather in all to be resigned than blest." 

These and many more are the natural appearances 
which, some by resemblance, some by contrast, furnish 
him with key-notes to religious meditation. In many 
you feel at once that the poet has struck a true note, 
one which will be owned by the universal imagination, 
wherever that faculty is sufficiently cultivated to be 
alive to it. In some you feel more doubtful, — the 
analogy appears to be somewhat more faint or far- 
fetched. In others you seem to see clearly that the 
resemblance is arbitrary and capricious, a work of the 
mere fancy, not of the genuine imagination. An in- 
stance of the last kind has been severely commented on 
by a contemporary critic who, on the strength of some 
doubtful analogies which occur in Keble's poems, has 
voted him no poet. This critic specially comments on 
one poem, in which the moon is made a symbol of the 
Church, the stars are made symbols of saints in heaven, 
and the trees in Eden of saints on earth. This, if it 
be not some remote allusion to passages of Scripture, 
must be allowed to be a mere ecclesiastical reading of 
nature's symbols, repudiated by the universal heart of 
man, and therefore by true poetry. But if this and 
some other instances, pitched on a false key, can be 
pointed out, how many more are there where the chord 
struck answers with a genuine tone ? Even in the 
very poem which contains the symbolism condemned, 
is there not the following : — 

u The glorious sky embracing all 
Is like the Maker's love, 



KEBLE. 263 

Wherewith encompassed great and small 
In peace and order move." 

Here Keble has christianized an analogy, acknowl- 
edged not only by the Greek conception of Zeus, but 
more or less, we believe, by the primeval faith of the 
whole Aryan race. 

Of the many instances that might easily be gathered 
from these poems, in which that mysterious chord of 
analogy that binds together human feeling and the out- 
ward world is truly touched, one more must be given. 
It is from the poem on All Saints' Day. As that day 
falls on the 1st of November, a time so often beautiful 
with the bright calm of St. Luke's summer, the follow- 
ing lines serve well to harmonize the feeling of the 
season with the thoughts which the Church Festival is 
meant to awaken : — 

" How quiet shows the woodland scene ! 

Each flower and tree, its duty done, 
Reposing in decay serene, 

Like weary men when age is won, 
Such calm old age as conscience pure 
And self-commanding hearts insure, 
Waiting their summons to the sky, 
Content to live, but not afraid to die. 

As might be looked for in a real lover of nature, 
Keble's imagery is that which he had lived in the midst 
of, and knew. The shady lanes, the more open hursts 
and downs, such as may be seen near Oxford, and 
further west and south, " England's primrose meadow 
paths," the stiles worn by generations, and the gray 
church-tower embowered in elm-trees, — with these his 
habitual thoughts and sentiments suit well. Even in 
this familiar landscape his eye and ear have caught facts 
and aspects of nature, which, as far as I know, have 
never before been put down in books. Take that 
instance from the poem on the Fifth Sunday after 
Easter — 



264 KEBLE. 

" Deep is the silence of the summer noon, 
When a soft shower 
Will trickle soon, 
A gracious rain, freshening the weary bower — 
sweetly then far off is heard 
The clear note of some lonely bird.'* 

Many an ear before Keble's must have heard a soli- 
tary thrush singing in the distant fields amid the deep 
hush that preludes the thunder-storm ; but no poet be- 
fore Keble, as far as I know, had seized that impress- 
ive image and embalmed it in verse. Not a few such 
images or aspects of the quiet English landscape will 
be found reclaimed from the fields for the first time in 
"The Christian Year." With this kind of scenery, 
which was familiar to him all his life, he is for the most 
part content, and seldom travels beyond it. Indeed, a 
very true test of the genuineness of a poet's inspira- 
tion would seem to be, whether his imagery is mainly 
gathered from the scenes amidst which he has lived, or 
is borrowed from the writings of former poets or other 
artificial sources. Seldom does Keble visit mountain 
lands, only once or twice in " The Christian Year." 
But the poem for the 20th Sunday after Trinity, though 
good, might have been written by one who had never 
seen mountains, if only he had read descriptions of 
them. 

Besides the English there is another kind of land- 
scape in which Keble has shown himself at home. 
Dean Stanley has noted the fidelity with which he has 
pictured scenes in the Holy Land. This shows not 
only a close study of the hints that are to be found in 
the Bible and in the modern books about Palestine, — 
it proves how quick must have been the insight into 
nature of one who, though he had never himself be- 
held that country, could from such materials call up 
pictures true enough to satisfy the eye of the most 



KEBLE. 265 

graphic of modern travellers even while he gazed on 
those very scenes. 

There are two sides which nature turns towards the 
imagination. One is that which the poet can read fig- 
uratively, in which he can see symbols and analogies 
of the spiritual world. This side Keble, as we have 
seen, felt and read, in the main I think truly, though 
sometimes he may have missed it. What the true 
reading is, and how it is to be discerned, is a weighty 
matter to be entered on here. One thing, however, is 
certain, that the correspondency between the natural 
object and the spiritual, between nature and the soul, is 
there existing independently of the individual man. 
He did not make the correspondency ; his part is to 
see and interpret truly what was there beforehand, not 
to read into nature his own views or moods waywardly 
and capriciously. The truest poet is he who reads na- 
ture's hieroglyphics most truly and most widely ; and 
the test of the true reading is that it is at once wel- 
comed by. the universal imagination of man. This 
universal or catholic imagination of man is far different 
from the universal suffrage of men. It means the im- 
agination of those in whom that faculty exists in the 
highest degree, cultivated to the finest sensibility. The 
imagination is the faculty which reads truly, the fancy 
that which reads capriciously, and so falsely. The 
former seizes true and really existing analogies be- 
tween nature and spirit; the latter makes arbitrary and 
fictitious ones. In the school of imagination, as op- 
posed to fancy, Keble was a faithful and devout stu- 
dent. It was the music of his pious spirit to read 
aright the symbolical side which nature turns towards 
man. 

But nature has another side, of which there is no 
indication in Keble's poetry. I mean her infinite and 



266 KEBLE. 

unhuman side, which yields no symbols to soothe man's 
yearnings. Outside of and far beyond man, his hopes 
and fears, his strivings and aspirations, there lies the 
vast immensity of nature's forces, which pays him no 
homage, and yields him no sympathy. This aspect of 
nature may be seen even amid the tamest landscape, if 
we look to the clouds or the stars above us, or to the 
ocean roaring around our shores. But nowhere is it 
borne in on man as in the midst of the vast deserts 
of the earth, or in the presence of the mountains, 
which seem so impressive and unchangeable. Their 
strength and permanence so contrast with man — of 
few years and full of trouble ; they are so indifferent 
to his feelings or his destiny. He may smile or weep, 
he may live or die ; they care not. They are the 
same in all their ongoings, happen what will to him. 
They respond to the sunrises and the sunsets, but not 
to his sympathies. All the same they fulfill their 
mighty functions careless though no human eye should 
ever look on them. So it is in all the great move- 
ments of nature. Man holds his festal days, and na- 
ture frowns ; he goes forth from the death-chamber, 
and nature affronts him with sunshine and the song of 
birds. Evidently, it seems, she marches on, having a 
purpose of her own inaccessible to man ; she keeps her 
own secret, and drops no hint to him. This mysteri- 
ous silence, this inhuman indifference, this inexorable 
deafness, has impressed the imagination of the greatest 
poets with a vague yet sublime awe. The sense of it 
lay heavy on Lucretius, Shelley, Wordsworth, and 
drew out their soul's profoundest music. This side of 
things, whether philosophically or imaginatively re- 
garded, seems to justify the saying, that " the visible 
world still remains without its divine interpretation." 
But it was not on thoughts of this kind that Keble 



KEBLE. 267 

loved to dwell. If they ever occurred to him, he has 
nowhere expressed them. He was content with that 
other side of nature, of which I spoke first, the side 
which allows itself to be humanized, that is, to be in- 
terpreted by man's faith and devout aspirations. This 
was the side that suited his religious purpose, and to 
this he limited himself. Within this range few have 
ever interpreted nature more soothingly and beauti- 
fully. 

These are a few of the qualities that would strike 
any one on first opening " The Christian Year." They 
are not, however, enough to account for its unparalleled 
popularity. Indeed, popularity is no word to express 
the fact, that this book has been for years the cherished 
companion of numbers of the best men, in their best 
moods — men too of the most diverse characters and 
schools — who have lived in our time. The secret of 
this power is a compound of many influences hard to 
state or explain. It has not been hindered by the blem- 
ishes obvious on the surface to every one, inharmonious 
rhythms, frequent obscurity, here and there poverty and 
conventionality of diction. In spite of these it has won 
its way to the hearts of the highly educated and refined, 
as no book of poetry, sacred or secular, in our time has 
done. Will it continue to do so ? Will its own im- 
perfections, and the changing currents of men's feelings 
not alienate from it a generation rendered fastidious by 
poetry of more artistic perfection, more highly colored, 
more richly flavored? Without speaking too confi- 
dently, it may be expected to live on, if not in so won- 
derful esteem, yet widely read and deeply felt ; for it 
makes its appeal to no temporary or accidental feelings, 
but mainly to that which is permanent in man. It can 
hardly be that it should lose its hold on the affections 
of English-speaking men as long as Christianity retains 



2 08 KEBLE. 

it. For if we may judge from the past, it will be long 
ere another character of the same rare and saintly 
beauty shall again concur with a poetic gift and power 
of poetic expression, which, if not of the highest, are 
still of a very high order. Broader and bolder imagi- 
nation, greater artistic faculty, many poets who were 
his contemporaries possessed. But in none of them did 
there burn a spiritual light so pure and heavenly, to 
transfigure these gifts from within. It is because 
" The Christian Year " has succeeded in conveying to 
the outer world some effluence of that character which 
his intimate friends loved and revered in Keble, that, 
as I believe, it will not cease to hold a quite peculiar 
place in the affections of posterity. 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 



TTht is Ethical Science, as pursued in this country, 
of late years, even to reflecting men, so little attractive 
and so little edifying? The cognate study of meta- 
physics has, after long neglect, recently, in a wonderful 
way, renewed its youth, but to moral science no such 
revival has as yet come. And yet human character, 
the subject it deals with, is one, it would seem, of no 
inconsiderable interest. Physical science has no doubt 
drained off the current of men's thoughts, and left 
many subjects which once engaged them high and dry. 
But man, his spiritual being, and the light which is to 
enlighten it, his possibilities here, his destiny hereafter, 
these still remain, amid all the absorption of external 
things, the one highest marvel, the permanent centre 
of interest to men. It cannot be said that modern lit- 
erature — the great exponent of what men are think- 
ing — circles less than of old round the great human 
problems. Rather with the circuit of the suns, not 
only have the thoughts of men widened, but also their 
moral consciousness, I will not say their heart, has 
deepened. Modern literature, as compared with that 
of last century, has nothing more distinctive in it than 
this, — that it has broken into deeper ground of senti- 
ment and reflection, ground which had hitherto lain 
fallow, non-existent, or unperceived. About the deeper 
soul secrets, literary men of last century either did not 



270 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

greatly trouble themselves, or they practiced a very 
strict reserve. But our own and the preceding age 
has seen an unveiling of the most inward — often of 
the most sacred feelings — which has sometimes gone 
beyond the limits of manliness and self-respect. This 
bringing to light of layers of consciousness hitherto con- 
cealed, if at times carried too far, has certainly enriched 
our literature with new wealth of moral content. In the 
best modern poetry it has shown itself by greater inten- 
sity and spirituality ; in the highest modern novels, by 
delicacy of analysis, discrimination of the finer tints of 
feeling, variety and fine shading of character hitherto 
unknown ; in the modern essay, by a subtleness and 
penetrative force which make the most perfect papers 
of Addison seem almost trivial. It further manifests 
itself in the growing love and keener appreciation of 
the few great world poets, who are after all the finest 
embodiments of moral wisdom. It may be that so much 
ethical thought has been turned off into these channels 
that it has left less to be expended in the more sys- 
tematic form of ethical science. It may be too, that, as 
the field of moral experience widens, and the meaning 
of life deepens, and its problems become more complex, 
it demands proportionably stronger and rarer powers 
to gather up all this wealth, and illumine it with the 
light of reason. Certain it is that the modern time 
produces no such masters of moral wisdom for our day, 
as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius were to the old 
world, or even as Bishop Butler was to his generation. 
Wide, many-sided, sensitive, deep, complex, as is the 
moral life in which we now move, if we would seek 
any philosophic guidance through its intricacies, any 
thinking which is at once solid, clear, practical, and in- 
stinct with life, we must turn, not to any modern trea- 
tise, but to the pages of these by-gone worthies. What 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 271 

help ardent spirits, looking for guidance in our day, 
have found, has been won not from the philosophers, 
but from some living poet, some giant of literature with 
no pretension to philosophy, or some inspired preacher. 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Frederick 
Robertson, these, not the regular philosophers, have 
been the moral teachers of our generation, and to these 
young men have turned, to get from them what help 
they might. And now it seems that in these last days 
many, wearied out with straining after their impalpable 
spiritualities, and baffled for lack of a consistent spirit- 
ual theory, have betaken themselves to a style of think- 
ing which, if it promises less, offers, as they think, 
something more systematic and more certain. In de- 
spair of spiritual truth, they are fain to fill their hunger 
with the husks of a philosophy which would confine all 
men's thoughts within the phenomenal world, and deny 
all knowledge that goes beyond the co-existences and 
successions of phenomena. 

From aberrations like this perhaps no moral philos- 
ophy would have delivered men. But it would be 
well if, warned by such signs, it were to return closer 
to life and fact, deal more with things which men 
really feel, if, leaving general sentiments and moral 
theories, it would attempt some true diagnosis of the 
very complex facts of human nature, of the moral 
maladies from which men suffer, the burdens they 
need to have removed, the aspirations which they can 
practically live by. Instead of this, — instead of deal- 
ing with the actual and the ideal, which co-exist in man, 
and out of which, if at all, a harmony of life is to be 
woven, philosophers have been content to repeat a 
meagre and conventional psychology, taken mostly 
from books, not fresh from living hearts ; or they have 
lost themselves in the metaphysical problems which 



272 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

no doubt everywhere underlie moral life, but which, 
pursued too exclusively, distract attention from the 
vital realities. These two causes have exhausted the 
strength and the interest of moral study — either a 
cut-and-dried conventional psychology, or absorbing 
metaphysical discussion. The former, in which moral 
truths appeared shriveled up, like plants in a botanist's 
herbarium, is the style of thing you find in the most 
approved text-books of the last generation. 

" Never before," as one has smartly said, " had hu- 
man nature been so neatly dissected, so handily sorted, 
or so ornamentally packed up. The virtues and vices, 
the appetites, emotions, affections, and sentiments stood 
each in their appointed corner, and with their appro- 
priate label, to wait in neat expectation for the season 
of the professorial lectures, and the literary world only 
delayed their acquiescence in a uniform creed of moral 
philosophy till they should have arranged to their 
satisfaction whether the appetites should be secreted 
in the cupboard or paraded on the chimney-piece ; or 
whether certain of the less creditable packets ought 
in law and prudence, or ought not in charity, to be 
ticketed ' Poison/ Everything was as it should be, 
or was soon to be so — differences were not too dif- 
ferent, nor unanimity too unanimous — opinion did 
not degenerate into certainty, nor interest into ear- 
nestness, moral philosophy stood apart, like a literary 
gentleman of easy circumstances, from religion and 
politics, and truth itself was grateful for patronage, 
instead of being clamorous for allegiance. Types were 
delicate, margins were large, publishers were attentive, 
the intellectual world said it was intellectual, and the 
public acquiesced in the assertion. What more could 
scientific hearts desire ? " 

This description may contain something of carica- 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 273 

ture, and yet there are books enough on moral science 
which justify it — books which have no doubt suc- 
ceeded in disgusting many with the subject of which 
they treat. Nor has moral philosophy suffered less 
from those deeper and more abstract discussions which 
have often in modern times been substituted for itself. 
Men of a profounder turn have so busied themselves 
with investigations of the nature of right, the law of 
duty, freedom, and necessity, and such like hard matters, 
that these have absorbed all their interest and energy, 
and left none for the treatment of those concrete real- 
ities which make up the moral life of man. Not that 
such discussions can be dispensed with. They are 
always necessary, never more so than now, when the 
spiritual ground of man's moral being is so often denied 
by materialistic or by merely phenomenal systems. 
It would perhaps, however, be well that they should 
be made a department by themselves, under the title 
of Metaphysic of Ethics, to be entered on by those 
who have special gifts for such inquiries. For when 
substituted for the whole or chief part of moral inquiry, 
they become " unpractical discussions of a practical 
subject," and as such alienate many from a study 
which, rightly treated, would deepen their thought and 
elevate their character. 

For what is the real object with which moral science 
deals ? Every science has some concrete entity, some 
congeries of facts, which is called in a general way its 
subject-matter. Botany, we say, deals with plants or 
herbs, geology with the strata which form the earth's 
crust, astronomy with the stars and their motions, psy- 
chology with all the states of human consciousness. 
What, then, is the concrete entity with which moral 
science deals ? It is not the active powers of man, 
nor the emotions, nor the moral faculty — not these, 
18 



274 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

each or all. It is simply human character. This is 
the one great subject it has ever before it. About this 
it asks what is character, its nature, its elements ; what 
influences make it, what mar it; in what consists its 
perfection, what is its destiny ? This may seem a 
very elementary statement, but it is quite needful to 
recur to it, and even to reiterate it, so much has it 
been lost sight of in the pursuit of side questions 
branching out of it. At the outset, before any anal- 
ysis is begun, the student cannot too deeply take in 
and ponder the impression of character as a great and 
substantive reality. Some vague perception of char- 
acter all men, of course, have. They are aware, 
whether they dwell on it or not, that men differ not 
only in face and form and outward appearance, but in 
something more inward, they cannot exactly tell what. 
But further than this confused notion most persons do 
not go. Others there are who see much more than 
this, who have a keen penetrating glance into every 
man they meet, apprehend his bias, know what manner 
of man he is, and deal with him accordingly. This 
gift, so useful in practice, we call an eye to character ; 
those who possess it, good judges of character. It is 
the same gift of discerning the quality of men which 
some persons have of judging of horses and other 
cattle. JEschylus spoke of a good judge of character 
as 7rpo/3aToyvwfxci)v. But this practical insight, so use- 
ful in business, and it may be to a certain extent 
in speculation, is something distinct from a fine and 
deep perception of the higher moralities of character. 
Shrewd observers of human nature are often keen to 
discern the weaknesses and foibles of men, and even 
to exaggerate them, but slow to perceive those finer 
traits of heart which lie deeper. The apprehension 
of character with which the student should begin, and 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 275 

which his moral studies ought to deepen, is somethiug 
very different from this. It is an eye open to see, a 
heart sensitive to feel, the higher excellences of human 
nature, as they have existed, and still exist in the best 
of the race. It is a spirit the very opposite of that 
of the cynic, one which, while it looks steadily at the 
moral maladies and even basenesses into which men 
fall, yet, without being sentimental, loves more to con- 
template the nobler than the baser side, which, behind 
the commonplaces and trivialities, can seize life's 
deeper import, and look up, and aspire towards the 
heights which have been attained and are still attain- 
able by man. To call out and strengthen in young 
minds such perceptions is one main end of moral 
teaching. No doubt there are influences which can 
do this more powerfully than any teaching. To have 
seen and known lives which have embodied these fair 
qualities, to have felt the touch of their human good- 
ness, to have companioned with those — 

11 Whose soul the holy forms 
Of young imagination hath kept pure; " 

to have fed on high thoughts, and been familiar with 
the examples of the heroes, the sages, the saints of 
all time, so as to believe that such lives were once on 
earth, and are not impossible even now^, — these are, 
beyond all teaching, the " virtue-making " powers. 
But moral philosophy, though subordinate to these, is 
useless if it does not supplement them ; if it does not 
at once justify the heart's aspiration on grounds of 
reason, and strengthen, by enlightening, the will to 
pursue them. Character, then, in the concrete, truth- 
ful, solid, pure, high, as " better than gold, yea than 
fine gold, its revenue than choice silver," — as the best 
thing we meet with in all our experience, the one 



276 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

thing needful for a man, which to have got is to get 
all, to have missed is to miss all, — this cannot be too 
fully set before the learner at the outset, as the goal 
to which all his inquiries must tend, which alone 
gives his inquiries any value. If this is not seen and 
grasped broadly and deeply at first, and its presence felt 
throughout all our reasoning, the discussion and anal- 
ysis that follow become mere words — hair-splitting 
and logomachy. 

To observe moral facts, and retain them steadily, 
requires a moral perception innate or trained, or both. 
Every reader of Aristotle's Ethics will remember his 
saying, that " he should have been well trained in his 
habits who is to study aright things beautiful and just, 
and in short all moral subjects. For facts are the 
starting-point. ,, Quickness and tenacity of moral per- 
ception is not so much an intellectual as a moral gift. 
Nay, it is easy to overdo the intellectual part of the 
process. Too rigid logic, too exact defining and sub- 
dividing of that which often can be but inadequately 
defined, kills it. It is like trying to hold a sunbeam 
in an iron vice. The faculty that will best catch the 
many aspects and finer traits of character must be a 
nice combination, an even balance between mental 
keenness and moral emotion. It is the heart within 
the head which makes up that form of philosophic 
imagination most needed by the moralist. If moral 
character, in its higher aspects, were set thus truly and 
strongly before young minds, it would require little 
else to counteract materialism. Such elevating views 
might be left, almost without reasonings, to work their 
natural effect on all who were susceptible of them. 

Character has been defined as "a completely fash- 
ioned will." This, as has been said, is to be kept 
continually before us in all moral inquiry as its prac- 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 277 

tical end, — that which gives it solidity. But when 
once we have looked at it steadily, whether as it has 
existed actually in the best men, or in the ideal, the 
question at once arises, How is this right character to 
be attained ? How is the good that is within to be 
made ascendant, — the less good to be subordinated, 
the evil to be cast out ? Of the numerous questions 
which this practically suggests, as to the standard by 
which character is to be tested, the foundation of moral 
goodness, and many more, the simplest and most 
obvious is to ask, What is in man? What are the 
various elements of man's nature ? Thus we are at 
once landed in psychology. And so it has happened, 
that almost all great ethical thinkers, whatever their 
method, even when it depends mainly on certain great 
a priori conceptions, have attempted some enumeration 
of the various parts or elements which make up human 
nature. Begun by Plato and Aristotle, carried on by 
the Stoics, revived in modern times by Hobbes, not 
neglected even by demonstrative Spinoza, this way of 
proceeding by observation of living men, and of our 
own minds, formed the whole staple of Bishop Butler's 
method. It is strange, as we read the first fetches into 
human nature of those early thinkers, with how much 
more living power they come home to us than modern 
psychologies. This comes probably of their having 
read their facts straight off their own hearts, or from 
observation of other men. There is something in the 
first thoughts of the world which can never recur, 
something in having been the first utterer of those 
words, the first noter of those distinctions, which 
thenceforth were to become the common inheritance 
of all men. Compared with theirs, the moral psychol- 
ogy of recent times has for the most part become stale 
and conventional, because, the first main outlines 



278 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

having been already laid down, the moderns have but 
repeated with slight alterations the old analysis, pre- 
senting us with tabulated lists of appetites, desires, 
passions, affections, and so forth, at which men only 
yawn. In fairness, however, I must allow, although 
with an entire dissent from the fundamental principles 
of Professor Bain's philosophy, that I have found in 
his elaborate work on the " Emotions and the Will " 
many facts which are either new, or at least which I 
have not before seen registered in systematic treatises. 
Certainly if psychology is to interest and instruct once 
more, it must leave the stereotyped forms, and enrich 
itself with new and hitherto unnoted facts, gathered 
partly from the more subtle and varied shades of 
feeling, partly from the wider survey of human history, 
and the deepened human experience which the latest 
civilization has opened up. The surest method then 
for ethical science, is to begin with moral psychology ; 
that is, with a close study of the phenomena which 
make up man's moral nature. This is its beginning, 
but not its end. From observation of these, it will 
be led down to fundamental ideas which underlie 
them ; belonging to that border land where morality 
and religion meet. 

Whatever be the method most applicable to system- 
atic moral treatises, there can be little doubt that for 
the learner and the careful investigator alike, the sure 
path is from the known to the unknown, starting from 
the concrete facts of which all may be conscious, to 
work thence backward towards the hidden principles 
which these facts embody. To say this is but to say 
that moral science should adhere to the method which 
has been found best in all other sciences. This is no 
new view, but at least as old as Aristotle. The words 
in which he insists on it, early in his Ethics, are famil- 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 279 

iar enough. But the old truth has been lately so well 
stated in an essay by Mr. Wilson of Rugby, on " Teach- 
ing Natural Science/' that I cannot do better than give 
in his own words his admirable statement. Substitute 
the word u moral " for u natural," and every word he 
says of physical science will apply with still stronger 
force to ethical, in proportion as the facts which the 
latter deals with are more dim and hard to grasp, and 
therefore more liable to pass into mere phrases and 
formulae. Mr. Wilson observes, " There are two differ- 
ent methods of teaching science : one the method of 
investigation, the other the method of authority. The 
first starts with the concrete and works up to the ab- 
stract ; starts with facts, and ends with laws ; begins 
with the known, and ends with the unknown. The 
second starts with what we call the principles of the 
science ; announces laws and includes the facts under 
them; declares the unknown, and applies it to the 
known." Of " the two, the latter is the easier, the 
former is by far the better." Again, why the former 
is the better he thus shows : " 1st, Because knowl- 
edge must precede science, which is only systematized 
experience and knowledge. A certain broad array of 
facts must preexist and be known, before scientific 
methods can be applied. 2d, Whatever new facts you 
give the learner they must not be purely foreign facts, 
but must fit on to his already existing stock. It is to 
this existing knowledge, and to that alone, you must 
dig down to get a sure foundation, and the facts of 
your science must reach continuously down, and rest 
securely thereon. Otherwise you will be building a 
castle in the air." These observations are as applica- 
ble to the learner of moral as of physical science. Nor 
less worthy of the moralist's attention are Mr. Wilson's 
further remarks, showing how easily scientific teaching 



280 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

passes from things to words. If strange terms and 
formulae are presented to the learner before he has 
realized the ideas and laws which these express, he is 
at once landed in " cram." No scientific name should 
ever be given for a fact or idea, before there is a real 
need for it ; that is, before the fact or idea is clearly 
grasped, and the want of a name to fix it is really felt. 
Then, and not till then, the new name may be safely 
given. No principle of classification should be an- 
nounced before we have fairly climbed by steps of 
reasoning up to it. Any one who has observed young 
students in philosophy knows how readily they catch 
up technical words, which have a high sound, but are 
for them almost meaningless. And this danger is much 
greater in moral than in physical subjects, because from 
the very nature of the former, unmeaning words so 
much more easily take the place of thoughts, and the 
substitution is so much more harder to detect. Many 
feel this so keenly that they consider it a fatal objection 
against mental philosophy being made a study for the 
young. It fills the young head, they say, with windy 
abstractions merely, which have under them no solid 
content. When Watt of Harden lifted the cover off 
the dish which his fair Flower of Yarrow now and 
then served up to him, he found at least a pair of clean 
spurs, which told him it was time to rise and ride. 
But when you lift the cover off these abstractions, they 
say, you find not even cold hard spurs, but only empty 
wind. The only way to counterwork this danger, to 
which, I admit, young philosophers are exposed, is to 
begin with the facts of consciousness that lie at our feet. 
We may not be able to climb thence to the upper 
heights, but we shall at all events make sure of possess- 
ing the near, if we do not reach the far. 

Let it not be said that, by thus insisting on a broad, 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 281 

sure basis of fact to begin with, I condemn moral 
science to pure empiricism, and confound it with mere 
physical science. This might be true if I confined its 
aim, as has sometimes been done, to observing and clas- 
sifying successive " states of mind," and of emotion. 
But when we remember that the facts it has to take 
account of are no mere passive states, but such facts as 
personality, will, conscience, though the method we 
start with is the same as the physical, our very obser- 
vations soon transport us into a very different region, 
in which the thought most forced on us is not the like- 
ness, but the contrast, to physical phenomena. As for 
staying at home, confined to mere empiricism, we shall 
soon find that these home-facts, so near us, are close in 
kin and neighborhood to whatever is highest in being. 
From the facts of moral consciousness, fully realized, 
pathways strike off that lead to the remotest distances of 
history, and down to the profoundest depths of thought. 
We shall not less surely trace the evolution of moral 
systems, and the growth of moral ideas, because we 
have begun with grasping the concrete facts which, in 
their complex state, have first met us in every-day ex- 
perience. Nor shall we thus be in a worse position to 
investigate the fundamental idea of right which lies 
under all morality, and to inquire whether there is 
righteousness which pertains not to man only, but in 
which all rational beings alike are sharers. 

There are two ways in which moral psychology may 
go to work. It may begin at the core of man's being, 
at the central creative energy, the mysterious con- 
scious " I," the fully formed personal will, and then 
show how the several powers and feelings stand related 
to this free centre of spontaneity. But the easier, if 
less scientific way is, beginning at the outside, to follow 
what we may conceive to be the historical growth of 



282 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

the individual, as well as of the race, and to show how 
each of the phases of our being successively rises into 
prominence. Such a survey would place before us 
man in his earliest stage as a mass of natural appeten- 
cies or instinctive tendencies, each seeking blindly its 
appropriate end, the reaching of which is necessary to 
continued existence. Accompanying these primitive 
desires, we should find certain faculties which are the 
instruments by which the former read their end, — the 
executive as it were of the blind impulses. During 
this stage, the spontaneous action of these appetencies 
engenders certain secondary passions, such as love of 
things which help the attainment of their ends, hatred 
of things which thwart them. Of these primitive out- 
goings, some we can see have reference to the good of 
self, some to the good of others, long before self-grati- 
fication is set before us as a conscious object. Such is 
the earliest stage of our existence, — the appetitive, 
the spontaneous or semi-conscious, as we see it in in- 
fants, or in uncivilized tribes. This is the raw mate- 
rial, as it were, out of which character is to be formed. 
The aggregate amount of all these primitive ele- 
ments, and the relative proportions in which the higher 
and the lower are mingled in each man, will go far to 
determine what he will ultimately become. 

But out of the midst of this blind congeries expe- 
rience develops new powers. Very early in the appe- 
titive life the desires must meet with obstacles, and the 
faculties that purvey for them are thwarted, driven in- 
ward, and forced to concentrate themselves for a more 
conscious effort to remove the hindrance. Here, then, 
is the first dawning, the earliest consciousness of will, 
within us. Again, out of the appetitive life, when ex- 
perienced long enough, there rises ever more clearly 
a power of intelligence or reflection which, observing 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 283 

that each desire has its own end, and that the attain- 
ment of that end brings pleasure, generalizes from 
these separate goods the idea of a general good for our 
whole nature, a satisfaction arising from the permanent 
gratification of all our desires, or at least of as many 
of them as may be possible. Reflection soon perceives 
that desire left to act blindly — our nature swayed 
now by this, now by that impulse — does not attain to 
any stable happiness. Some kinds of action, it ob- 
serves, make towards this happiness, others thwart it ; 
the former it calls useful actions, the latter hurtful. 
From these observations it generalizes the idea of a 
total personal good or self-interest as an end to be 
aimed at, and forms subordinate rules of conduct with 
a view to attain that end. Self-interest, thus intelli- 
gently conceived, may become an end of life, or what 
is called motive — an ever present motive to guide the 
will. Governed by this motive, the will can control 
anarchic passion and introduce order into a man's de- 
sires and conduct. In doing this, the will, besides the 
power of reflection, is fortified by the emotions also ; 
because by a law of our nature, self-interest, when 
once conceived as an end, is eagerly embraced as a 
new object for the affections. This is the second or 
prudential stage of our nature. Some men remain all 
their lives in the former or appetitive stage, and these 
we call impulsive men. Others regulate their actions 
by well- calculated self-interest, and these we call pru- 
dent, or it may be, if self-interest is too absorbing, self- 
ish men. But though the two types of character are 
clear, yet so infinitely diversified are these simple ele- 
ments in themselves, and in their degrees of strength, 
that perhaps no two men ever lived in whom they 
were compounded exactly alike, in no two men was the 
same physiognomy of character ever reproduced. 



284 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

But not any or all of the elements yet noticed, how- 
ever mingled, would make what is called a moral be- 
ing ; they do not yet rise above the life of nature. 
To do this, there needs to dawn another and higher 
consciousness. Reflection cannot stop at the idea of 
merely personal good, for it sees that there are other 
beings of the same nature and desires as ourselves, 
who have each a self-interest of their own as well as 
we. But as the personal good of others often collides 
with ours, and as one or other must give way, we begin 
to see that the good of others deserves as much re- 
spect, ought to be as sacred in our eyes, as our own. 
So we rise to feel that, above our sensitive and individ- 
ual life, there is a higher, more universal order to 
which we and all individual souls even now belong, 
that this higher order secures and harmonizes the ulti- 
mate good of all rational beings, and that the particu- 
lar good of each, though in harmony with this order, 
and an element of it, must be subordinated to it To 
realize this spiritual order, and be a fellow-worker with 
it, is felt to be the absolute, the moral good, an end in 
itself, higher and more ultimate than all other ends. 
This idea, this end, this impersonal good, once con- 
ceived, comes home to us with a new and peculiar con- 
sciousness. In its presence we for the first time be- 
come aware of a law which has a right to command us, 
which is obligatory on us, which to obey is a duty. 
Seen in the light of this law, the good of others, we 
feel, has a right to determine our choice/ equally with 
our own, and our own good loses its merely temporary 
and finite, and assumes an impersonal and eternal 
character. This consciousness it is which makes us 
moral agents. Only in the idea of such a transcend- 
ent law above us, independent of us, universal, and of 
a will determined by it, does morality begin. All 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 285 

other elements of our nature are called moral, only as 
they bear on this, the overruling moral principle. The 
consciousness just described constitutes the third or moral 
stage of human nature. Not that the second and the 
third stages occur in every man in the order now laid 
down. A man may become alive to the moral law, and 
to its obligation over him, before he has conceived of 
self-interest as an end of action. But the order here 
given marks the relative worth of the respective prin- 
ciples, and the culmination of our nature in that one 
which is its proper end. 

It would be easy to show how all the moral systems 
have taken their character from giving to one or other 
of these three principles of action, the emotional, the 
prudential, and the moral, a special prominence, invest- 
ing some one element or some particular disposition of 
all the elements, with paramount sovereignty. But I 
must pass on to notice a defect inherent in this and 
every attempt to map out human nature into various 
compartments, — a defect which, when unperceived, as 
it mostly is, distorts, if it does not falsify, the whole 
work of the analysts. Even if the most exact enumer- 
ation, the most minute analysis could be made, would 
this give all that makes up character ? It is a common 
mistake with psychologists to suppose that it does. 
They fancy they can grasp life by victorious analysis. 
There can be no greater, though there is no more com- 
mon delusion. What is it that analysis, the most per- 
fect, accomplishes? It gives the various elements 
which go to make up a moral fact, or it may be said to 
give the various points of view which a phenomenon or 
group of phenomena presents. But is this all ? Is 
there nothing more than what is found in the analyst's 
crucible? The analysis, that is, the unloosing, the tak- 
ing down into pieces of the bundle, may be complete ; 



286 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

but where is the power of synthesis, the bond which 
held the bundle together ? Where is the life which 
pervaded the several elements, and made of them one 
entire power ? It is gone, it has escaped your touch. 
Can the botanist after he has divided a flower into its 
component parts, pistil, stamen, anther, petals, calyx, 
put them together once more, and restore the life and 
beauty that were there? This is the main error of 
psychologists. They fancy that when they have com- 
pleted their analysis they have done all, not consider- 
ing that it is just the most unique and mysterious part 
of the problem which has eluded them. What the late 
Professor Ferrier shows so well against the psychol- 
ogists, that the "ego," the one great mystery, ever 
escapes them, the same takes place in the analysis of 
every other living entity. In a human character, when 
you have done your best to exhaust it, to give its whole 
contents, that which is its finer breath, has it not es- 
caped you ? must not you be content to own that there 
remains behind a something " which no language may 
declare ? " What end then serves analysis ? By 
bringing out, separately and in detail, each side, aspect, 
or element in any problem, and fixing the eye on each 
successively, it helps to give distinctness and exactness 
to our whole conception of it. But it is only the mul- 
tiplicity that is thus given ; the unity or rather the 
unifying power still remains ungrasped. And if we are 
to see character in its truth, we must, after analysis has 
done its work, by an act of philosophic imagination re- 
make the synthesis, put the elements together again. 
If we do this rightly, something will reappear in the 
synthesis which had disappeared in the analysis, and 
that something will be just the idiosyncratic element — 
the central creative energy — which individualizes the 
whole man. To a moral philosophy which shall give 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 287 

the truth, this synthesis is even more essential than the 
analysis. 

Of the many questions which have been, and may 
still be asked respecting virtuous character, there is 
one, not the least important, and certainly the most 
practical of any, which has received less attention from 
moralists than it deserves. It is this : Supposing 
that we have settled rightly what the true ideal of char- 
acter is, how are we to attain to it ? what is the dy- 
namic power in the moral life ? what is that which shall 
impel a man to persevere in aiming at this ideal, shall 
carry him through all that hinders him outwardly and 
inwardly, and enable him, in some measure at least, 
to realize it ? Other questions, it would seem, more 
stimulate speculation, none has more immediate bearing 
on man's moral interests. For confused and imperfect 
as men's notions of right may be, it is not knowledge 
that they lack, it is the will and the power to do. 
Change one word, and all men will make the apostle's 
confession their own : u To know is present with me, 
but how to perform that which is good I find not." 

It is to this subject, then, the dynamic or motive 
power in moral life, that I would turn attention in the 
sequel. Under the word motive three things are in- 
cluded, which are usually distinguished thus, — the 
objective truth or reality, which, when apprehended and 
desired, determines to action ; the mental act of appre- 
hending this object ; and the desire or affection which 
is awakened by the object so apprehended. To this 
last step, which immediately precedes the act of will, 
and is said to determine it, the term " motive " is often 
exclusively applied. But in the present inquiry into 
the dynamic or motive power, I shall use the word in a 
wider sense, including all the three elements in the pro- 
cess, and applying it more especially to that one which 



288 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

is the starting point, namely, the objective truth or 
reality which, addressing the understanding, and stirring 
the affections, ultimately sways the will. , And the 
question I ask is, What is that objective truth, or class 
of truths, which determines the will in a way which 
can rightly be called moral? What are those truths 
which, apprehended and entering into a man, enable 
him to rise into that state of being which is truly virtu- 
ous or moral ? 

In doing so it will be well to ask first, what answers 
to this question may be found in the works of some of 
the great masters of moral wisdom. In his survey of 
moral systems, Adam Smith remarks that there are two 
main questions with which moralists have to deal. The 
first is, What is virtue ? or, more concretely, In what 
consists the virtuous character, — that temper and con- 
duct in a man which deserves to win the esteem of his 
fellow-men ? The second is, What is the faculty in us 
by which we discern and approve the virtuous char- 
acter? — in other words, By what power do we dis- 
tinguish between right actions and praise them, and 
wrong actions and blame them ? Of the question which 
I propose now to consider, the dynamic power which 
enables us to do the right, it is remarkable that Smith 
makes no mention. In discussing this, which I may 
call the third main question of morals, I shall have 
occasion to advert to the former two, but shall do so no 
further than as they bear on the third, which is our 
more immediate concern. 

Smith has classified philosophers mainly by the 
answers they give to the first of the three questions. 
Some, he remarks, place virtue in the proper balance 
and harmony of all the faculties and affections which 
make up our human nature, some in the judicious pur- 
suit of our own happiness, a third set in benevolence, 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 289 

that is, in the affections which seek the happiness of 
others. The first of these three answers to the great 
question, What is the virtuous character ? has been 
sanctioned by the greatest names of past time, — by 
Plato, by Aristotle, by the Stoics, and by Bishop 
Butler. Let us glance at their theories, with a view 
to find what help there is in them as to the dynamic 
power we are in search of. 

With Plato originated the idea that virtue is a 
proper balance or harmony of the various powers of 
the soul ; and though it has often since been elaborated 
into detail, it has never been put in a form so beautiful 
and attractive. It is one of those great though simple 
thoughts first uttered by that father of philosophy which 
have taken hold of the world, and which it will never 
let go. Repeated in our ordinary language, it sounds 
a commonplace ; but in the Greek of " The Republic " 
it stands fresh with unfading beauty. He divides the 
soul, as is well known, into three elements, — desire, 
passion or courage, and intellect ; and this division, 
variously modified, has held its ground in philosophy 
till now. The StKaioavv^, or righteousness of the in- 
dividual soul, he places in a proper balance or harmony 
of these three elements, in which each holds that posi- 
tion which rightfully belongs to it. The state is the 
counterpart of the individual soul, and its SiKatoavvr), or 
right condition, is attained when the three orders of 
guardians, auxiliaries, and producers, answering to 
reason, passion, appetite respectively, stand in their 
proper order of precedence. This is the philosophy 
which Shakespeare makes Ulysses speak. " In the 
observance of degree, priority, and place," stands — 

" The unity and married calm of states." 

" How could communities, 
Degrees in schools , and brotherhoods in cities, 
19 



290 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, 

The primogenitive and due of birth, 

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, 

But by degree, stand in authentic place? 

Take but degree away, untune that string, 

And, hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets 

In mere oppugnancy." 

The man is righteous in whom each of the three ele- 
ments holds its proper place, and does its proper work ; 
and tills inward harmony expresses itself in an outward 
life which is every way righteous. The power which 
discerns the right and orders all the elements of the 
soul, is intellect or reason, whose right it is to rule. 
But how is this harmony of soul, once discerned, to be 
reached, maintained, made energetic ? Plato, of philos- 
ophers the least mechanical, the most dynamic, the 
most full of powers of life, cannot have left this ques- 
tion wholly untouched, though he has not dealt with it 
systematically. His hope was that this may be done 
in the state by educating the guardians, who are philos- 
ophers ; in the individual, by educating the reason, 
which is the sovereign principle, through continual 
study of real truth, continual contemplation of the ideal 
good. The highest object of all is the Essential Form 
or Idea of the Good which imparts to the objects 
known the truth that is in them, and to the knowing 
mind the faculty of knowing truth. This idea of the 
good is the cause of science and of truth. It gives to 
all objects of knowledge not only the power of being 
known, but their being and existence. The good is not 
existence, but is above and beyond existence in dignity 
and power. " The purpose of education," he says, " is 
to turn the whole soul round, in order that the eye of 
the soul, or reason, may be directed to the right quarter. 
But education does not generate or infuse any new 
principle ; it only guides or directs a principle already 
in existence." So far in " The Republic." 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 291 

Again, in the famous myth of the Phaedrus where 
reason is imaged by a charioteer driving a chariot 
drawn by two horses, one high-spirited and aspiring, 
the other earthward groveling, Plato makes the char- 
ioteer able just to raise his head, and look out for a 
moment on that super-celestial place, which is above 
heaven's vault, and to catch a glimpse of the realities 
that are there, — the colorless, formless, intangible 
substance on which the gods gaze without let or 
hindrance. The glimpse, which the better human 
souls thus get, fills them with love of the reality. 
They see and feast on it, and are nourished by it. It 
is this idea or essence of the good, the cause of exist- 
ence and knowledge, the vital centre in the world of 
thought, as the sun is in the world of sight, which is 
the object of contemplation to the reason. "And 
reason," Plato says, " looking upwards, and carried to 
the true Above, realizes a delight in wisdom, unknown 
to the other parts of our nature." This idea of good 
is the centre at once of morals and politics, the right- 
ful, influencing power in human action. It should be 
ever present to the mind ; a full philosophic conscious- 
ness of it should be the ruling power in everything. 
Nor is it an object merely for the pure reason, but for 
the imagination also, and an attractive power for the 
higher affections which side with reason. This glimpse, 
then, vouchsafed to none but the purest in their purest 
hour, may be supposed to be to them an inspiration 
that will not desert them all their lives after. It will 
make them hunger and thirst after truth and righteous- 
ness, and despise, in comparison of these, all lower 
goods. So far this intuition of the good will be a 
dynamic power. But this master- vision, if it be pos- 
sible at rare intervals, for the select souls of earth, and 
if it were adequate to sustain them in the pursuit of 



292 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

goodness, is at best a privilege for the few, not an 
inheritance for mankind. And Plato did not dream 
of it as more. From the mass of men he turns in 
despair, and leaves them to their swine-troughs. He 
did not conceive that for all men there was an ideal, 
or any power sufficient to raise them towards it. In 
Plato, then, the moral dynamic force we are seeking is 
in small measure, if at all to be found. 

Shall we find it in Aristotle ? Although the " Eth- 
ics " contains more than one division of human nature, 
which helped forward psychological analysis, yet the 
whole system is not determined by any such division, 
but by certain leading objective ideas. Foremost 
among these is that of an end of action. There is an 
absolute end of all action, an end in itself, and man's 
constitution is framed conformably to this end, and in 
realizing it lies the total satisfaction of his nature, his 
well-being. Everything in nature has its end, and 
fulfills it unconsciously, but a moral being must fulfill 
his end not blindly, but with conscious purpose. The 
end in itself consciously chosen and pursued, this is 
Aristotle's fundamental ethical idea. 

The end or the good for man is a vivid conscious- 
ness of life, according to its highest excellence, or in 
the exercise of its highest powers. Sir Alexander 
Grant, in his very able dissertation on ivipyeta, shows, 
with great felicity, how Aristotle regarded man's chief 
good as " nothing external to him, but as existing in 
man and for man ; existing in the evocation, the vivid- 
ness, and the fruition of his powers. It is the con- 
scious vitality of the life and the mind in the exercise 
of its highest faculties. This, however, not as a per- 
manent condition, but one that arises in us, oftenest 
like a thrill of joy, a momentary intuition. Were it 
abiding, we should be as God." In order to find in 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 293 

which part of man this highest excellence is to be 
found, Aristotle has recourse to a psychological division, 
not of his own making, but apparently well known at 
the time. He divides the internal principle (^xv) mto 
the physical or vegetative part, the semi-rational or 
appetitive, and the purely rational. The first has no 
share in human excellence, in the second lies moral 
excellence or virtue, in the third lies intellectual excel- 
lence. Aristotle here founds the distinction between 
moral and intellectual, beyond which we have not yet 
got. Practical moral excellence has its seat in the 
second division of our nature, in the passions which, 
though not purely rational, have communion with rea- 
son. And though Aristotle, in the end, gives to the 
purely intellectual excellence, which consists in philo- 
sophical contemplation, a higher place than he assigns 
to the exercise of the moral virtues, yet it is of these 
he chiefly treats, and with these we have now to do. 
Moral virtue, then, he defines as consisting in a de- 
veloped state of the moral purpose, in a balance rela- 
tive to ourselves, which is determined by reason. This 
is Aristotle's famous doctrine, that virtue is a mean, an 
even balance, a harmony of man's powers. It is a 
mean as exhibited in particular actions, and also a mean 
or balance struck between opposite excesses of feeling. 
Feelings, passions, actions, are the raw materials out 
of which character is to be wrought by aiming at a 
balance. Right reason is the power which determines 
what the mean or balance is. It reviews the whole 
circumstances of the case, strikes the balance, appre- 
hends the rule by which the irregular feelings may be 
reduced to that regularity in which virtue consists, 
virtue as well in particular acts as in habits, and in 
the whole character. The mean is not a " hard and 
fast line," but a balance struck anew in each particular 



294 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER, 

case, from a consideration of all the circumstances. 
The virtuous character is slowly elaborated by a rep- 
etition of virtuous acts ; acts, that is, midway between 
extremes. And then as to knowing what the real 
mean is, man must begin and act from his own percep- 
tions, such as they are. His own individual reason 
must be the guide he starts with, but he is not therefore 
shut up in subjectivity. He has a surer standard than 
individual judgment to appeal to, even the universal 
moral sentiment of men. Or rather in the wise man, 
the ideally perfect man, he has a kind of objective con- 
science, an embodiment of moral law ; and he judges 
according as he knows that this ideally wise man 
would judge. Here, then, we have a theory of virtue 
and the virtuous character, but no answer to the ques- 
tion, What is the motive power which shall propel men 
towards this ideal ? Indeed, full though his treatise is 
of wise and penetrating practical remarks on character, 
this subject is nowhere discussed by Aristotle ; but if 
one were to gather from him an answer for one's self, 
it might perhaps be something like this : — 

Reason of itself cannot reach the will and mould 
the choice. Yet reason and those emotions which are 
most obedient to it, act and react on each other. In 
time, by the law of habit, they blend together and 
make up a moral habit of soul, which restrains and 
directs all the lower impulses. When intellect and the 
more generous emotions combine in seeking one end, 
and by repeated acts form a habit, the result is the 
perfected moral judgment or practical wisdom, which 
itself is both a guide and a sufficient motive power to 
impel the soul steadily to good. Qpovrjcns is with 
Aristotle the perfection of the moral intellect. He 
does not say that it is an interpenetration of the moral 
with the intellectual side of human nature, but that 



TEE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 295 

there is an inseparable connection between this prac- 
tical wisdom (<j>p6vrj(TLs) and moral virtue. In his 
view, these two sides, if not blended in one habit, are 
brought much closer together than in Plato, and that, 
both in the discerning and in the ruling moral fac- 
ulty. 

The elaboration of the virtuous character by the 
formation of good habits is a long and slow process. 
Does Aristotle point to any spring of inspiration which 
may carry a man through it? Plato after his own 
fashion does. Far off and inaccessible as his idea of 
the good may be, there is something in it, and in his 
enthusiasm for it, which must kindle, as by contagion, 
all but the dullest. But in Aristotle, though at every 
turn you meet insights into human nature which you 
feel to be penetratingly true, you are, after all, left 
to evolve the virtuous habit out of your own inward 
resources. There is in him no hint of anything which 
may come home to a man inwardly, and supplement 
his moral weakness by a strength beyond his own. 
All that he suggests is of a merely external kind. 
Besides moral teaching, such as himself and other mor- 
alists give, he bids men look for help to such institu- 
tions, either domestic or political, as may assist them 
in the cultivation of virtue. 

Amongst moderns, Bishop Butler, as is well known, 
has been the chief expounder of the idea which origi- 
nated with Plato, that the virtuous character consists 
in a harmony of the different powers of man. This, 
the leading idea of his sermons, has so worked itself 
through his teaching into modern thought, that it need 
not now be dwelt on. A system, a constitution, an 
economy, in which the various parts — appetites, pas- 
sions, particular affections — are all ranged in due gra- 
dation under the supreme conscience ; this is his doc- 



206 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

trine of man. In working out this idea, while the 
great Bishop has contributed much of his own, espe- 
cially the masterly analysis by which he proves the 
existence in man of originally unselfish, as well as of 
self-regarding affections, he recalls here the teaching 
of Plato, there that of Aristotle. Though he deals 
entirely with individual man, he illustrates his idea of 
gradation and moral harmony by Plato's image of a 
civil constitution, with its various ranks subordinated 
under one supreme authority. On the other hand, 
his idea of conscience comes much nearer to that of 
Aristotle's <^po^/o-ts than that of Plato's reason. But 
in Butler's " conscience," there is a much more dis- 
tinct presence of the emotional or moral element, 
while the notion of an obligatory power or right to 
command, so characteristic of modern as distinguished 
from ancient thought, comes strongly out. But para- 
mount as is this idea with Butler, it is strange that 
whenever we go beyond it, and ask for a reason why 
conscience should be supreme, he fails us. Entrenched 
within his psychological facts, he refuses to go beyond 
them. Ask what is the rule of right, the canon by 
which conscience decides, he replies, Man is a law to 
himself; every plain honest man who wishes it, will 
find the rule of right within himself, and will decide 
agreeably to truth and virtue. This is like saying 
that conscience decides by the rule of conscience. If 
asked, Why should I obey conscience ? Butler can 
but assume that conscience " carries its own authority 
with it, that it is our natural guide," that it belongs 
to our condition of being, and therefore it is our duty 
to obey it. If a further sanction is sought, he seems 
to find it in the fact of experience, that the path of 
duty and that of interest coincide, " meaning by interest 
happiness and satisfaction." If there be exceptions, 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 297 

these will be set right in the final distribution of things. 
" Duty and interest are perfectly coincident, for the 
most part here, entirely hereafter ; this being implied 
in the very notion of a good and perfect administration 
of things." In this coincidence of duty and interest, 
so far fulfilled in our present experience, and ultimately 
made sure by the existence of a Moral Governor of 
the world, seems to lie a great part of the dynamic 
power in Butler's system. To this may be added his 
remark, in the spirit of Aristotle, that obedience to 
conscience, when it has grown into a habitual temper, 
becomes a choice and a delight. 

But in the sermons on the Love of God he strikes 
another strain. He there demonstrates to an unbe- 
lieving age that the affection he speaks of is no dream, 
but a most sober certainty. For as we have certain 
lower affections which find sufficing objects in the 
world around us, so we have higher faculties and moral 
emotions, which find but inadequate objects in the 
scattered rays of created wisdom, power, and goodness 
which this world contains. To these faculties and 
affections God himself is the only adequate supply. 
They can find their full satisfaction only in the con- 
templation of that righteousness which is an everlast- 
ing righteousness, of that goodness in the sovereign 
mind which gave birth to the universe. This is But- 
ler's highest doctrine, which he sets forth with a calm 
suppressed enthusiasm almost too deep for words. 
This contemplation can create the highest form of 
happiness, but it is not for this that it is sought. 
It would cease to be the ultimate end that it is, if 
sought for the sake of happiness, or for any end but 
itself. There can be no doubt that if once realized, 
this would be, as we shall see, in the highest measure, 
the dynamic of the soul. 



298 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

Butler's search for virtue is wholly through psychol- 
ogy. Plato and Aristotle, though they do not begin 
with it, very soon have recourse to it. Kant, on the 
other hand, when seeking for principles of morality, 
disdains to fumble after them among the debris of ob- 
servation and experience, but searches for them wholly 
a priori among the pure ideas of the reason. We find 
nothing in him about the virtuous character consisting 
in a harmony of the mental elements, although it might 
be said that his idea of virtue is a will in harmony with 
the moral universe. Laying his hand at once on the 
individual will, and intensifying to its highest power the 
idea of responsibility, he starts with the assertion that 
the only real and absolute good in the whole world is a 
good will. And a good will is one purely and entirely 
determined by the moral law. This law is not a law 
generalized out of human experience, binding therefore 
only within the range of that experience, but a law 
which transcends it ; is wide as the universe, and ex- 
tends in its essential principle to all beings who can 
think it. Man, according to Kant, shut in on every 
side of his being to a merely relative knowledge, in the 
moral law for the first time escapes out into absolute 
truth, truth valid not only for all men, but for all intel- 
ligents. Human conscience is nothing but the entering 
into the individual of this objective law — the witness, 
as it has been called, that the will or self has come into 
subjection to, and harmony with, the universal reason, 
which is the will of God. 

From the reality of this law Kant deduces three 
great moral ideas. First, since it commands impera- 
tively, unconditionally, we must be able to obey it. 
Freedom, therefore, as a necessary consequence, follows 
from the consciousness of an imperative law of duty. 
Again, in this phenomenal life, we see the will that 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 299 

would obey duty hindered by many obstacles, crushed 
by many miseries, unrewarded with that happiness 
which rightfully belongs to it. There must, therefore, 
be a life beyond this phenomenal one, where the hin- 
drances shall be removed, where duty and the will to 
obey it shall have full play, where virtue and happi- 
ness, here often sundered, shall at last meet. That is, 
there must be an immortality. Lastly, reason repre- 
sents to us the moral will as worthy of happiness. But 
we see that here they do coincide. Nature does not 
effect such a meeting ; man cannot constrain it. There 
must be somewhere a power above nature, stronger 
than man, who will uphold the moral order, will bring 
about the union between virtue and happiness, between 
guilt and misery. And this being is God. Such is 
Kant's practical proof of the great triad of moral truths 
in which the morally-minded man believes, — Freedom, 
Immortality, and God. The necessity for the belief in 
these arises out of the reality of the moral law. 

To Kant's ideal of duty it matters nothing, though 
it is contradicted by experience, though not one in- 
stance could be shown of a character which acted on, 
or even of a single action which emanated from, the 
pure unmingled moral law. The question is not what 
experience shows, but what reason ordains. And 
though this ideal of moral excellence may never yet 
have been actualized, yet none the less it remains a 
true ideal — the one standard which the moral judg- 
ment of man approves, however in practice he may fall 
beneath it. On this pure idea of the moral law Kant 
would build a science of ethics, valid not for man only, 
but for all intelligent beings. Applied to man, it would 
need to be supplemented by an anthropology, and would 
then stand to pure ethics, as mixed stand to pure math- 
ematics. 



300 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

As to the relation in which, according to Kant, the 
objective moral law stands to the human conscience, 
there is a very ingenious speculation of the late Pro- 
fessor Ferrier, which may illustrate it. He asks the 
question whether it is the existence of our minds which 
generates knowledge, or the entering of knowledge into 
us which constitutes our minds ? Is the radical and 
stable element Mind, and is Intelligence the secondary 
and derivative one ? Professor Ferrier's reply is, that 
" It is not man's mind which puts him in possession of 
ideas, but it is ideas, that is knowledge, which first puts 
him in possession of a mind." The mind does not 
make ideas, but ideas make mind. In like manner, ap- 
plying the same principle to poetic inspiration, he shows 
that it is not the poetic mind which creates the ideas 
of beauty and sublimity which it utters, but those ideas 
which, entering into a man, create the poetic mind. 
And so in moral truth, it is not our moral nature which 
makes the distinction between right and wrong, but the 
existence of right and wrong, apprehension of them by 
us, which create our moral nature. " I have no moral 
nature," he says, " before the distinction between right 
and wrong is revealed to me. My moral nature exists 
subsequently to this revelation. At any rate, I acquire 
a moral nature, if not after, yet in the very act which 
brings me the distinction. The distinction exists as an 
immutable institution of God prior to the existence of 
our minds. And it is the knowledge of this distinction 
which forms the prime constituent, not of our moral ac- 
quisitions, but of our moral existence." This very in- 
genious speculation, which is in the very spirit of the 
Platonic philosophy, may serve to illustrate Kant's view 
of the priority and independence of the moral law to 
our apprehension of it. 

Where, then, is the motive power in the Kantian 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 301 

ethics ? Kant's answer is plain. It is the naked rep- 
resentation of duty, the pure moral law. And this, ac- 
cording to Kant, exerts so strong a motive power over 
the will, that it is only when a man has acknowledged 
its obligatory force, and obeyed it, that he learns for 
the first time his own free causal power, his inde- 
pendence of all merely sensitive determinators. The 
naked moral law, defecated, as he speaks, of all emo- 
tions of the sensory, is the one only dynamic which he 
admits as truly moral. This acting on the will, with 
no emotion interposed, will alone, he insists, place 
morality on a true foundation, will create a higher 
speculative ethics, and a higher practical morality, and 
will awaken deeper moral sentiments, than any system 
of ethics compounded now of ideal, now of actual ele- 
ments, can do. 

In the rigidity with which he holds that in pure 
moral action the law shall alone sway the will, that all 
emotion, love the purest, pity the tenderest, shall have 
no place, Kant is ultra-stoical. The representation of 
duty, when embraced, will awaken reverence for the law, 
and this is a pure moral emotion. But in determining 
the act, the stern imperative must stand alone, and re- 
fuse all aid from emotion or affection. For these there 
is no room in a pure morality, except as the submissive 
slaves of duty. 

In making this high demand it should be remembered 
that Kant is setting forth, not an actual state which he 
expects to find in human nature, but an ideal, which 
nevertheless, because it is an ideal, affects human nature 
more powerfully than any maxim merely generalized 
from experience. And perhaps if the moral idea is to 
be set forth in its native strength and dignity, it is well 
that it should be exhibited thus nakedly. It does come 
shorn of much of its power, when so largely mingled, as 
it is in Butler, with considerations of mere prudence. 



302 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

As has been remarked, however, even Kant, much as 
he desired to get rid of experience in constructing his 
morality, was not able to do so. He was obliged to 
come to experience before he could give content to his 
moral law — " So act, that thou couldst consistently will 
the principle of thy action to become law universal for 
all intelligents. ,, So Kant shaped his imperative. This 
is not very unlike Austin's utilitarian question, " What 
would be the probable effect on the general happiness or 
good, if similar acts were general or frequent ? " Again, 
as we saw, he is obliged to supplement his moral life 
here with the belief of a future life, where virtue and 
happiness shall be one, where the ideal shall become act- 
ual ; thus proving that human feelings cannot to the end 
be banished from a moral system, that of happiness some 
account must be taken. And yet Kant is right in giv- 
ing to such considerations a subordinate, not a primary, 
place. 

From this brief survey of the motive power as it ap- 
pears in the systems of some of the most famous " Intu- 
itive Moralists," it would have been interesting, had 
space allowed, to have turned to the Utilitarian theorists, 
and examined at length the answers they give to the 
same question. As it is, however, a few remarks must 
suffice. This school of philosophers, as is well known, 
maintains that utility, or the tendency to promote pleas- 
ure or to cause pain, is the only quality in actions which 
makes them good or bad. They hold, moreover, that 
pleasure and pain are the only possible objects of choice, 
the only motives which can determine the will. These 
are the fundamental tenets of that school of philosophers 
represented by Epicurus in the ancient world, and by 
Bentham and his followers, Mr. Mill and Professor 
Bain, in our own day. If by the happiness which is 
said to be the end of action is meant merely the happi- 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 303 

ness of one's self, the system is one of the plainest and 
most intelligible, the dynamic force is the most obvious, 
and the most surely operating, that can well be imagined. 
But then the course of action dictated by the desire of 
exclusive self-interest is not, according to the view of 
most men, a moral one at all, and the motive is not 
moral, but selfish. The aim of all morality, truly con- 
ceived, is to furnish men with a standard of action, and 
a motive to work by, which shall not intensify each 
man's selfishness, but raise him ever more and more 
above it. If, on the other hand, it is said that it is not 
my own private interest, but the general interest, which 
I am to aim at, this may be said in two distinct senses : 
Either I am to seek the greatest happiness of all men, 
the sum total of human interests, because an enlightened 
experience tells me that my happiness is in many ways 
bound up with theirs. But the good of others thus pur- 
sued is only a means to my own private good, and I am 
still acting on a selfish motive — a strong but not a 
moral one. Or I am to aim at the general happiness 
for its own sake, and not merely as a means to my own. 
But then I am carried beyond the range of self-interest, 
and acknowledge as binding other motives which lie 
outside of the utilitarian theory. To the question, Why 
am I to act with a view to the happiness of others ? the 
utilitarian can, on his own principles, give no other an- 
swer than this, Because it is your own interest to do so. 
If we are to find another, we must leave the region of 
personal pleasure and pain, and acknowledge the power 
of some other motive which is impersonal. With Ben- 
tham it is a fundamental principle that the desire of per- 
sonal good is the only motive which governs the will. 
This is the one exclusive mode of volition which he rec- 
ognizes. He denies the other two, unselfish regard for 
others, and the moral law or the abstract sense of right, 



304 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

and yet these two exist as really as self-love. It is just 
as certain a fact that men do sometimes act from gener- 
ous impulses, or from respect to what they feel to be 
right in itself, apart from all consequences, as that they 
do often act merely with an eye to their own happiness. 
In the naked form, therefore, in which Bentham puts it, 
utilitarianism is founded on a psychological mistake. 
But the utilitarian system takes many forms. Yet, as 
Jouftroy, who has discriminated between the varieties 
with great acuteness, observes, - Whether a man pur- 
sues the gratification of impulse, or the accompanying 
pleasure, or the different objects fitted to produce it ; 
whether he prefers, as most fitted to promote his highest 
good, the satisfaction of certain tendencies and pleasures ; 
or finally, whether for the attainment of his end he 
adopts the circuitous means of general interest, or the 
direct pursuit of his own, is of little consequence to de- 
termine : he is impelled to act, in every instance, by cal- 
culations of what is best for himself. Self-love remains 
essentially the same under all its forms, and impresses a 
similar character upon the various schemes of conduct to 
whieh it leads." 

In Mr. Mill's treatise on "Utilitarianism" there is in 
words no departure from the fundamentals of the utili- 
tarian creed, though ingenuity is strained to the utmost 
to make that creed include principles and sentiments 
which are really alien to it. Indeed, in this treatise 
one prominent characteristic of all the author's writings 
is more than usually conspicuous. On the one hand, 
with an amiable obstinacy he adheres to the sensational 
and utilitarian tenets which formed his original philo- 
sophic outfit. On the other hand, he employs a re- 
dundance of argument, sometimes verging on special 
pleading, to reconcile to his favorite hypothesis views 
and feelings gathered in alien regions, with which his 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER, 305 

widened experience has made him familiar. The effort 
continued throughout his " Utilitarianism " has occa- 
sioned, if one may venture to hint it, a want of clear 
statement and of precise thought, with sometimes a 
straining of the meaning of terms, which one hardly 
expects to meet with in so trained a logician. This 
comes no doubt from the fact, that in order to adapt 
the utilitarian theory to the primary moral perceptions 
of men, it is necessary to go counter to the natural 
current of thought, and to give a twist to forms of 
speech, which have interwoven themselves into the 
very texture of language. One of these strange con- 
tortions is the following opinion : that it is the idea of 
the penal sanction which makes men feel certain acts 
to be wrong ; not that they are wrong in themselves, 
and therefore visited with punishment. Or, as Mr. Mill 
otherwise expresses it, " the deserving or not deserv- 
ing punishment lies at the bottom of the notions of 
right and wrong." This doctrine, which Mr. Mill seems 
to hesitate to state in all its breadth, else instead of 
" deserving " he would probably have written " imposi- 
tion of punishment," has been stated more explicitly by 
Professor Bain, who maintains that u the imposition of 
punishment is the distinctive property of acts held to 
be morally wrong ; " and again, that " the primary germ 
and commencement of conscience is the dread of punish- 
ment." Another equally startling position maintained 
by Mr. Mill, is that virtue is pursued primarily only as a 
means to an end, namely happiness, just as money is ; 
but that in time it comes to be regarded as part of the 
end, happiness, and as such is pursued for its own sake, 
just as misers come to love money for itself, and not 
for its uses. He holds that in man originally there is 
no desire of virtue, or motive to it, save as a means to 
gain pleasure or avoid pain. But even when desired 
20 



306 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

for its own sake, which he grants it conies to be, its 
worth arises, not from its own intrinsic excellence, but 
from its being the most important of all means to the 
general happiness. 

But what it more concerns us to remark at present 
is the answer which Mr. Mill gives to the question, 
What is the sanction of the utilitarian ethics, what the 
motive to conform to this standard? It is of two 
kinds, the external and the internal. The external 
motive is the hope of favor or the fear of punishment 
from our fellow-men or from the Supreme Ruler. The 
internal motive is primarily the desire of our own hap- 
piness, which, however, when enlarged by intelligence, 
expands into a desire for the good of others. It does 
so because the more we are enlightened the more 
clearly we perceive that our own good is inextricably 
bound up with theirs ; because there is in us a natural 
desire to be in unity with others ; lastly, because an 
unselfish regard for our neighbors springs, by the prin- 
ciple of association, out of intercourse begun at first 
merely from self-regard. It is observable, however, 
that Mr. Mill, though he stretches to the utmost the 
motive of self-regard, combining with it as much as 
possible of what is otherwise admirable in human na- 
ture, and though he seems to allow the existence, in a 
certain subordinate degree, of purely unselfish sympa- 
thies, yet in the last resort makes self-regard the cen- 
tre to which all the other feelings, as accretions, cling, 
and around which they are woven into " a complete 
web of corroborative association." In this ground-plan 
of human nature, the unselfish sympathies and the 
moral principle are not made to occupy — what I be- 
lieve they in reality do occupy — as substantial and in- 
dependent a place as the feeling of self-interest. Hence 
neither the standard of action, nor the motive power 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 307 

he sets forth, however much transformed by the magic 
touch of association, ever gets clear of the original 
taint of self-reference. Mr. Mill's utilitarianism does 
not, any more than other forms of the same doctrine, 
give either a really moral standard, or a self-forgetting 
and moral motive. As water cannot rise above the 
level from which it springs, no more can moral theo- 
ries. Self-love may be, and as a fact often is, the first 
impulse that drives a man to seek to become morally and 
religiously better. And there is a measure of self-regard 
which is right, wherein the individual self is identified 
with the universal self. But before a man can become 
either truly moral or religious, private self-regard must 
have been wholly subordinated to, if not entirely cast out 
by a higher principle of action and a purer affection. 

In the opening chapter of his work on " Jurispru- 
dence, ,, Austin sets forth the utilitarian doctrine with 
a distinctness of outline which far surpasses Mr. Mill's 
exhibition of it. He does not, like the latter, assert 
that conduciveness to general happiness is the essence, 
but only that it is the index of right action. The 
lightness and wrongness of all acts Austin grounds pri- 
marily on the Divine will or command. God designs 
the happiness of all his creatures ; and as He has given 
us faculties to perceive what actions tend to produce 
this, and what actions tend to thwart it, He has given 
us therein a criterion by which to know what his will 
is, that is, what actions we ought to do, what to avoid. 
This representation of the theory furnishes a lever 
above and independent of utility, namely, the will of 
God — and therefore, in one point of view, a motive 
which, if once realized, is every way adequate to engen- 
der moral action. But still it does not rise above the 
utilitarian subjection to pleasure and pain. For Aus- 
tin sums up the Divine will in pure benevolence, and 



308 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

grounds obedience to it solely on the fact that God can 
reward and punish to the uttermost. But to obey God 
chiefly or entirely for such a reason, does not amount to 
moral obedience, nor is such a motive a moral motive. 

There may perhaps be held a view which, differing in 
other respects from the utilitarian theory, agrees with it 
in regarding pleasure as the universal motive power in 
moral as well as in all other action. It may be said 
that in all cases where a choice is made, pleasure, or, as 
it is sometimes phrased, interest, is the determinator of 
the choice ; that in all conscious actions, thoughts, feel- 
ings, where a preference is made, it is because the pleas- 
ure of the one preferred is felt by the agent to be 
greater than the pleasure of those not preferred. The 
maintainer of such a theory would say that the com- 
monly received distinction between pleasure and duty is 
a misleading one. For whenever any act is preferred, 
this itself proves that act, however painful it seems, to 
be not only pleasurable, but the most pleasurable. Let 
there be two acts, it would be said, one a gratification 
of sense, and as such pleasurable, the other a denial of 
this gratification, and so far painful, yet if the latter is 
done from what is called a sense of duty, the fact that 
it has been preferred proves that it was not only pleas- 
ant, but the most pleasant to him who preferred it. 
For that which in the event is chosen to be done is 
thereby proved to be the most pleasurable. To this it 
may be replied that to make the pleasurable synony- 
mous with that which is actually preferred, is to give 
the term a quite new meaning. So to stretch the idea 
of pleasure is to change it entirely, and to render it 
wholly vague and empty of meaning. 

It may be true that in most, perhaps in all, moral 
acts, there is present more or less a conscious pleasure, 
but it is present as a consequence, not as an antecedent 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 309 

of the choice. It is also true that virtue and pleasure 
are so far from being incompatible, that the higher a 
man advances in virtue the greater is his delight in it ; 
indeed, that the measure of his delight is in some sort a 
gauge of his moral progress. But, on the other hand, 
it is no less true that while man remains in the present 
state of moral struggle, in some of his acts of purest 
duty the ingredient of pleasure must be so faintly pres- 
ent as to be inappreciable. To all theories of virtue 
which give pleasure or self-love a foremost place in it, 
whether as entering into its nature, or operating as its 
moving spring, it is enough to answer that they with- 
draw from moral action that which is a main constituent 
of it, namely, its unselfish character, and so reduce it to 
the level of at least mere prudence. They fail to recog- 
nize what Dr. Newman has so well described as " a re- 
markable law of ethics, which is well known to all who 
have given their minds to the subject. All virtue and 
goodness tend to make men powerful in this world ; but 
they who aim at the power have not the virtue. Again, 
virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest 
and highest pleasures ; but they who cultivate it for the 
pleasure-sake are selfish, not religious, and will never 
have the pleasure, because they never can have the vir- 
tue." There is no truth of ethics more certain than 
this. And it is not merely an abstract principle, but 
one which embodies itself in practice every day before 
our eyes. How continually do we see that the pleasure- 
seeker is not the pleasure-finder ; that those are the 
happiest men who think least about happiness ! Be- 
cause, in order to attain to that serene and harmonious 
energy, that inward peace, which is the only true happi- 
ness, a man must cease to seek pleasure, and apprehend 
some higher object to live for. So true is it that, as has 
been said, the abandoning of some lower end in obedi- 



310 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

ence to a higher aim, is often made the very condition 
of securing the lower one. Or, as the author of " Ecce 
Homo " writes, " It is far from universally true that to 
get a thing you must aim at it. There are some things 
which can only be gained by renouncing them." And 
such a thing moral pleasure is. Does not this charac- 
teristic, that when you make the pleasure your conscious 
aim, it is gone, — at least the purer essence, the liner 
bloom of it, — prove that it is merely a subsidiary ac- 
companiment of moral action, the attendant shadow, not 
the substance, and cannot therefore be its propelling 
power ? 

The foregoing survey of systems, ancient and modern, 
has been long, perhaps even to weariness, and yet it has 
not given us the thing we seek. In what have been 
called the intuitive theories, the motive presented, if 
high, has been remote and impalpable, not such as 
would naturally come home to the hearts of ordinary 
men. The narrower forms of utilitarianism offer a mo- 
tive near and strong enough — self-love ; but then it is 
one which men of moral aspiration most long to rise 
above. When the endeavor is made to combine with 
it benevolence, and to take in the whole human race, 
the motive is no doubt elevated, but at the expense of 
its power ; it is emptied of the strength which self-love 
peculiarly possesses. On the whole, then, from this 
want of practical help in many ways, and especially 
from their lack of a moral dynamic, it is no wonder 
that most men turn from ethical theories with weariness 
and even disgust. Young students, and older men pro- 
fessionally interested in these subjects, can hardly imag- 
ine how widely this is the case, not only with those so 
immersed in transitory interests as to have no time or 
heart for higher matters, but also with the devoutly re- 
ligious, with men of ideal longings, with those who have 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 311 

been much exercised with earnest questionings. Men 
who are simply religious turn from theories of virtue, as 
not only useless, but as cold, hard, unloving — obstruc- 
tions that come between them and that their heart most 
loves to commune with. Morality seems to draw all its 
help from man's own internal resources, and they feel 
too keenly that not in these is help to be found, but in 
a strength out from and above themselves. The inmost 
breathing of the devout heart is, " Lead me to the rock 
that is higher than I." And the deep-hearted poet, 
weary of abstractions, and longing for life, more life, and 
fuller, turns from moral theories with a passionate — 

" Away, haunt not thou me, 
Thou vain Philosophy ! 
Little hast thou bestead, 
Save to perplex the head 
And leave the spirit dead. 
Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go, 
While from the secret treasure depths below, 
Fed by the skyey shower, 
And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high, 
Wisdom at once, and Power 
Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly ? 



Why labor at the dull mechanic oar, 
When the fresh breeze is blowing, 
And the strong current flowing 
Right onward to the eternal shore? " 

Broken cisterns! this was all one of the deepest- 
minded men and most thoughtful poets of our time 
found in our moral systems after long enough study of 
them. 

Again, when we read the lives of those men who 
have had the deepest spiritual experience, to whom, on 
the one hand, the infinity of duty, the commandment 
exceeding broad, and, on the other, the depth of their 
own spiritual poverty, has been most laid bare — we 
find them confessing that the seventh chapter of Romans 



312 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

describes their condition more truly than any philos- 
opher has done. With their whole hearts they have 
felt St. Paul's " O wretched man that I am ! who shall 
deliver me ? " Such are the men who, having them- 
selves come out of great deeps, become the spirit-quick - 
eners of their fellow-men, the revivers of a deeper 
morality. To all such there is a grim irony in the 
philosophic ideas when confronted with their own 
actuals. So hopelessly wide seems the gap between 
their own condition and the " Thou shalt " of the com- 
mandment Not dead diagrams of virtue such men 
want, but living powers of righteousness. They do not 
quarrel with the moralist's ideal, though it is neither 
the saint's nor the poet's. They find no fault with his 
account of the faculty which discerns that ideal, though 
it is not exactly theirs. But what they ask is not the 
faculty to know the right, but the power to be right- 
eous. It is because this they find not, because what 
reason commands, the will cannot be or do, that they 
are filled with despair. As well, they say, bid us lay 
our hand upon the stars because we see them, as realize 
your ideal of virtue because we discern it. 

But is there no outlet by which, from the mere forms 
of moral thought, a man may climb upward to the 
treasure-house of its power? Let us turn and look 
once more at the moral law, as exhibited in its purest 
form by Kant. In this view the moral law is not a 
higher self, but an independent reality, which, entering 
into a man, evokes the higher self within him. To the 
truth, as well as the sublimity of Kant's conception, all 
hearts bear witness, by the reverence they must feel in 
its presence. And yet we know that, when we lay this 
bare law to heart, it engenders not strength, but despair. 
A few there may have been who have been able to 
dispense with all tender feelings, and to live high lives 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER, 313 

by dint of the law of duty alone. All honor to such 
hardy spirits ! no word shall be said in their disparage- 
ment. However imperfect their principle may be, 
their face is set in the right direction ; they are on the 
way, who but must believe it ? to all good. Yet their 
lives, upright though they may be, will be stern and 
unrejoicing, wanting in much that hearts set free should 
have. But for most men, and among these for many 
even in the nobler sort, such a life would be impossible. 
Under such an iron rule, a large, and that the finer 
part of man's being, would have no place ; the soul's 
gentler but more animating forces would be starved 
for lack of nutriment. Still, as this law contains so 
much of highest truth, let us keep fast hold of it, and 
see whence it comes, and whither it leads. 

On reflection we find that there are many facts of 
human nature and of the world, many separate lines of 
thought, all leading upward and converging on one 
spiritual centre. These are like so many mountain 
paths, striking upward in diverse directions, but leading 
all at last to one great summit. Of these the moral 
law is the loftiest, the directest, the most inward, the 
most awe-inspiring. 

But to begin with the outward world, there is, I 
shall not say so much the mark of design on all out- 
ward things, as an experience forced in upon the mind 
of the thoughtful naturalist, that, penetrate into nature 
wherever he may, thought has been there before him ; 
that, to quote the words of one of the most distin- 
guished, " there is really a plan, a thoughtful plan, a 
plan which may be read in the relations which you and 
I, and all living beings scattered over the surface of our 
earth, hold to one another." The work of the natural- 
ist, as he goes on to say, " consists only in an attempt 
to read more and more accurately a work in which he 



314 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

has had no part, — a work which displays the thought 
of a mind more comprehensive than his own ; his task 
is to read the thoughts of that mind as expressed in the 
living realities that surround us ; and the more we give 
up our own conceit in this work, the less selfish we be- 
come, the more shall we discern, the deeper we shall 
read, and the nearer we shall come to nature ; " and, it 
may be added, to Him whose thought nature is. 

Again, when we look within, there is " the causal 
instinct of the intellect," as it has been called, — the 
mental demand for a cause of every event, or rather 
the ineradicable craving for a Power behind all phe- 
nomena, of which they are but the manifestations, — a 
craving which no form of Comtean philosophy will ever 
exercise. 

Again, there is the passionate longing of the imagina- 
tion, aspiring after an ideal perfection for ourselves and 
others, apprehending a beauty more than eye has seen 
or ear heard. 

Again, there is " the unsufficingness of self for self," 
the dependency of the affections, feeling the need of 
an object like themselves ; yet higher, more enduring, 
all-perfect, on which they can lean, in which they may 
find refuge. 

Again, another avenue upward is a feeling of the 
derivative nature, not of our affections merely, but of 
our whole being. We are here a little while, — each 
a small rill of life, — containing many qualities. We 
feel, think, fear, love ; no facts are more certain to me 
than these. Yet it is just as certain that I am here 
not by my own will. I did not place myself here ; 
cannot keep myself here. My life is in the grasp of 
powers which I cannot, except in the smallest measure, 
and for only a little while, control. There must be a 
source whence this life, and all the other similar lives 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 315 

around me, come. And that source cannot be anything 
lower, or possessed of lower qualities, than myself, but 
rather something containing, in infinite abundance, all 
the qualities which I and all other beings like to me, in 
finite measure, have. There must be some exhaustless 
reservoir of being from which my small rill, and these 
numberless like rills of being, come, — a fountain that 
contains in itself the all of soul that has been diffused 
through the whole human race, and infinitely more. 
This is no elaborate argument, but almost an instinctive 
perception. Call it anthropomorphic, if you please ; 
it is none the less a natural and true way of thinking, 
and as old as the Stoics. Cicero puts it in the mouth 
of his Stoic Balbus, and has supplied him with no bet- 
ter argument. 

Lastly, and chief of all, there is the law of duty, com- 
ing home to the morally awakened man more inti- 
mately, affecting him more profoundly, than anything 
else he knows. What is it — whence comes it — this 
law, which lies close to all his thoughts, an ever-pres- 
ent, though often latent consciousness, haunting him 
like his very being? Mr. Mill speaks slightingly, as it 
seems, of " the sort of mystical character which is apt 
to be attributed to the idea of moral obligation/' but 
he has not as yet been able in any measure to remove 
the mystery. If instead of trying to resolve it unsat- 
isfactorily into lower elements, as the analyst is apt to 
do, or to shrink from it as the sensual nature always 
will do, or to act out merely the letter of it, as the 
legalist will try to do, we can but get ourselves to look 
at it steadily, and with open heart, the mystery of its 
nature and origin will not grow less to us, but more. 
What is it ; is it mere abstraction ? That which rea- 
son apprehends, and the personal will bows to, as an 
authority superior to themselves, cannot be a mere ab- 



316 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

straction, but something which is congenerous with 
themselves. The moral law must be either a self- 
existing entity, like to our highest nature, or must in- 
here in one who possesses all that we have of reason 
and will, only in an infinitely greater degree. That 
which our inner self, our personality, feels to have 
rightful supremacy over it, must be either in personal- 
ity, or something more excellent than personality, if 
that is possible. Lower than a personality it cannot 
be, and lower all mere laws and abstractions undoubt- 
edly are. To some such conviction as this we are led 
up, by asking what is this moral law which we appre- 
hend, and whence does it come? Here, if anywhere, 
we find the golden link which connects the human na- 
ture with the Divine. 

Putting then all these converging lines of thought to- 
gether, we see that they meet in the conviction that 
there is behind ourselves, and all the things we see and 
know, a Mind, a Reason, a Will, like to our own, only 
incomprehensibly greater, of which will and reason the 
moral law is the truest and most adequate exponent we 
have. Not that these lines, any or all of them, are to 
be taken as proofs demonstrating the existence of God. 
That is a truth, I believe, incapable of scientific demon- 
stration. The notion of God seems to be, as Coleridge 
has well expressed it, essential to the human mind, not 
derived from reasonings, but as a matter of fact actually 
called forth into distinct consciousness mainly by the 
conscience. When, however, we come to reflect on 
that belief afterwards, we find hints and confirmations 
of it, mainly in the existence of our moral nature and 
of the law of duty, and secondarily in those other lines 
of thought which, as we have seen, converge towards 
the same centre. But these are dim tracts of thought 
hard to tread with firm step. Yet though the lines as 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 317 

here traced are imperfect and broken, they may be 
taken for what they are meant to be, — hints for 
thought on an exhaustless subject. 

In this discussion I have taken for granted that the 
morality of man is in its essence identical with the mo- 
rality of God — that when we use the word righteous 
of man and of God, we do not use it in two different 
senses, but in the same sense. This position, implicitly 
held before by all, both philosophers and ordinary men, 
has been more explicitly brought out and established 
by the polemic which the late Dean Mansel's denial of 
it called forth. The result of a real faith not merely 
in an abstract moral law, but in a Personal Being, — 
in whom dwells the moral law and whatever of highest 
is in ourselves, of whose moral Being our moral nature 
is a faint but true image, — will be to let in on the soul 
a new motive power, a new centre of existence. This 
is the first condition of a living morality as well as of 
vital religion, that the soul shall find a true centre out 
from and above itself, round which it shall revolve. 
The essence of all immorality, of sin, is the making self 
the centre to which we subordinate all other beings 
and interests. To be delivered from this, the condition 
of the natural man is the turning-point of moral prog- 
ress, and of spiritual renewal. The new and rightful 
centre which shall draw us out of our self-centre, and 
by its attraction make us revolve round itself, must be 
that which contains the moral law, and whatever is best 
in ourselves, and in all other created selves. He only 
in whose image we are made can be such a centre to* 
our creaturely wills. But further, neither the God 
whom mere science hints of, nor the God whom the 
bare unrelenting moral law sets forth, is capable of being 
a real resting-place for the heart of man. There are 
warm emotions within it, which, before representations 



318 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

of a God of mere law, whether natural or moral, die 
down like herbs beneath an arctic winter. To call 
forth these, it requires the unveiling of a Living and a 
Personal Will, in sympathy not only with whatever 
moral principle is in us, but also with whatever is most 
pure and tender in our affections. When we come to 
conceive thus of God, then there becomes possible a 
going forth towards Him of the tenderer and devouter 
emotions, as well as of the more purely moral senti- 
ments. Such a Being becomes to man the centre and 
the end for his reason, affections, and conscience alike 
— a foundation on which his whole being can perma- 
nently repose. 

But few, and these only the most favored of the 
sons of men, have, apart from revelation, ever attained 
so to conceive of God. A pure-minded sage here and 
there — Plato, when he drops his dialectics and gives 
vent to his devouter mind, as in the well-known pas- 
sage of the " Thesetetus," Marcus Aurelius here and 
there in his meditations — may have in some measure, 
though far off, so caught a glimpse of Him. To most 
men who have sought Him at all, outside of Chris- 
tianity, it has been at best but a dim feeling after Him, 
if haply they might find Him. It required the ap- 
pearance of Christ on earth to bring close to the hearts 
of any number of men the power of moral inspiration 
which is laid up in the very thought of God. Till 
then He seemed too high, too remote for this. But 
when Christ in human form came near to them, his 
presence touched the moral springs in men, hitherto 
dormant, and made new forces of spiritual life stir 
within them. Christ henceforth, both by his own 
personal teaching and example, and also by the new 
light of God's character which He let in on men's 
hearts, — Himself the channel through which that light 






THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 319 

was let in, — became a new dynamic power of virtue, 
an inspirer of goodness. The virtue-making power 
which He used was different from that which had been 
employed by the philosophers. They addressed the 
reason ; He touched the whole man by his words, by 
his deeds, above all by contact with Himself. The 
two methods are well contrasted in the following pas- 
sage of " Ecce Homo " : — 

" Who is the philosophic good man ? He is one 
who has considered all the objects and consequences 
of human action ; he has, in the first place, perceived 
that there is in him a principle of sympathy, the due 
development of which demands that he should habitu- 
ally consider the advantage of others ; he has been led 
by reflection to perceive that the advantage of one 
individual may often involve the injury of several ; he 
has therefore concluded that it is necessary to lay 
down systematic rules for his actions, lest he should be 
led into such miscalculations, and he has in this rea- 
sonable and gradual manner arrived at a system of 
morality. This is the philosophic good man. Do we 
find the result satisfactory ? Do we not find in him a 
languid, melancholic, dull, and hard temperament of 
virtue ? He does right, perhaps, but without warmth 
or promptitude. And no wonder ! The principle of 
sympathy was feeble in him at the beginning for want 
of contact with those who might have called it into 
play, and it has been made feebler still by hard brain- 
work and solitude. On the other hand, who is the 
good man that we admire and love? How do men 
become for the most part pure, generous, and humane ? 
By personal, not by logical influences. They have 
been reared by parents who had these qualities, they 
have lived in society which had a high tone, they have 
been accustomed to see just acts done, to hear gentle 



320 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER, 

words spoken, and the justness and the gentleness have 
passed into their hearts and slowly moulded their 
habits, and made their moral discernment clear ; they 
remember commands and prohibitions which it is a 
pleasure to obey for the sake of those who gave them ; 
they think of those who may be dead, and say, How 
would this action appear to him? Would he approve 
that word, or disapprove it ? . . . . They are never 
alone, because the absent Examples, the Authorities 
they still revere, rule not their actions only, but their 
inmost hearts ; because their conscience is indeed 
awake and alive, representing all the nobleness with 
which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their 
most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the 
absent and the dead." 

It was this last mode of appeal, one not wholly 
unknown before his day, that Christ adopted. But 
though the channel was familiar, the use He made of 
it was not ; for the influence He poured through it 
was not only the purest human, but the Divine. The 
philosophers had addressed the reason, and failed. 
Christ laid hold of a passion which was latent in every 
man, and prevailed. What was this passion ? It was 
the love, not of man, " not of all men, nor yet of every 
man, but of the man in the man." But this in all men 
is naturally a weak principle ; how did He make it 
a powerful one, make it " a law-making power, a root 
of morality in human nature ? " He gave a command 
to love all men without exception, even our enemies. 
Now a command cannot create love ; but with the 
commandment He gave Himself to love, and to awake 
the love that lies dormant in every man. This, which 
is the central teaching of " Ecce Homo," must be given 
in the author's own words, so full of beauty and 
power : — 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 321 

"Did the command to love go forth to those who 
had never seen a human being they could revere? 
Could his followers turn upon him and say, How can 
we love a creature so degraded ? .... Of this race 
Christ Himself was a member, and to this day is it not 
the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the 
best consolation when our sense of its degradation is 
keenest, that a human brain was behind his forehead, 
and a human heart beating in his breast, and that 
within the whole creation of God nothing more ele- 
vated or more attractive has yet been found than He ? 
.... It was because the edict of universal love 
went forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical 
mood, but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, 
that words which, at any other time, however grandly 
they might sound, would have been but words, pene- 
trated so deeply, and along with the law of love the 
power of love was given. Therefore, also, the first 
Christians were enabled to dispense with philosophical 
phrases, and instead of saying that they loved the ideal 
of man, could simply say and feel that they loved 

Christ in every man Christ believed it possible 

to bind men to their kind" (and to all goodness), "but 
on one condition, that they were first bound fast to 
Himself." 

To his followers who walked with Him on earth, 
his presence, and to many in every age since, his 
image has been the strongest of all levers to lift them 
out of selfishness, and to new-create into goodness. 
They have found in his life and character an objective 
conscience better than all other ideals of perfection; 
in their sympathy with Him they have had the most 
unerring test by which to discern what was right and 
what was wrong to do ; and in their love and venera- 
tion for Him, a motive power beyond all powers, ena- 
21 



322 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

bling them to do what was right from the love of it, — 
a power of loving God and of loving man, because 
they loved both in Him. To such the law of love 
absorbed into itself and transfigured the law of duty, 
and became, in a new and preeminent way, the fulfill- 
ing of the law. Morality to them was no longer sub- 
jection and obedience to a dead abstract law, which 
they might revere but could not love, but an inspira- 
tion caught by contagion with Him who contained 
the moral law and all the springs of morality in Him- 
self. This is that central truth, long tacitly recognized, 
but enforced with such power in " Ecce Homo " as 
almost to appear new. 

If we were to go no further, we have enough to 
prove that Christ introduced into the moral heart of 
man that which all philosophers have been unable to 
find, — a new dynamic force, which not only told them 
what was good, but inspired them with the love and 
the power of being good. In short, He was the living 
centre of a new moral and spiritual creation. But if 
we go thus far, we cannot stop here, it would seem — 
we must go further than the author of " Ecce Homo " 
does. For Christ claimed for Himself, and all who 
had followed Him most closely have acknowledged, that 
there are other powers and truths in Him, which in 
that able survey are either left in the background or 
altogether passed by. Those more transcendent doc- 
trines, Christ's atonement, his resurrection, the in- 
dwelling of his Spirit, are as much part of the testi- 
mony about Christ and of the agencies by which 
He has changed the world, as anything that we know 
of his character. Indeed they are part, and a large 
part, of what makes his character. You cannot cut 
off the one without shaking the foundations of the 
other ; and these doctrines are, if true at all, not 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 323 

merely in conformity with the purest moral and spir- 
itual principles, but must be their very essence, must 
lie at their very root. Those who have most laid to 
heart and lived by these doctrines, have found in the 
Atonement the obliterating of all past sin, the lifting 
off the whole load of guilt. This is not the place to 
enlarge on these things. But no fact in man's moral 
history is more certain than this, that the simple state- 
ment of Scripture, " Christ has appeared to put away 
sin by the sacrifice of Himself," has been found effica- 
cious to reach down to the lowest depths of men's 
souls beyond any other truth ever uttered on this 
earth. In the Resurrection, they have found the as- 
surance that what conscience prophesies will in the 
end come true, that, though experience often seems 
against it, " right is stronger than wrong, truth is bet- 
ter than falsehood, purity shall prevail over sensual 
indulgence, meekness shall inherit the earth ; for right, 
truth, and purity are summed up in their champion 
Christ, and He has conquered death, the one uncon- 
querable champion of the enemy." In the promise of 
the indwelling Spirit, and its fulfillment, they have 
found a surety that the impulse which Christ first gave 
will not fail nor grow old, but will overcome all ob- 
stacles and outlast time. One great practical result 
of these truths is the animating confidence they give 
that " God is for us." There is nothing so crushing 
to moral effort as the suspicion that however we may 
strive to live rightly, the great forces of the universe 
may be after all against us. But here the Atonement 
and the Resurrection come in. They tell us that this 
suspicion is groundless, that God is not against us, 
but on our side, that the faintest desire to be better 
He sympathizes with, and will help ; that even on the 
heart where no such desire is yet stirring, He still 



324 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

looks tenderly, that He wills its salvation, and has 
proved that He really and deeply wills it by a self- 
sacrificing love greater than we can conceive. Can 
any strength for moral improvement go beyond this ? 
Nor is it merely a one-sided view of the love of 
God which thus comes to our aid. His righteousness 
too — since we must speak of these two things sepa- 
rately, though in reality they are one — his righteous- 
ness, if it turns on our selfish and sinful nature a side 
that is fearful, turns also on all our better longings a 
side that is full of hope. A righteousness that is per- 
fect, that is, a Divine righteousness, cannot be fully 
satisfied with merely apportioning reward and punish- 
ment according to desert. This, though one aspect 
of righteousness, is its lower and incomplete work. 
The righteousness which is perfect, or rather the per- 
fectly Righteous One, must long to bring all his intel- 
ligent creatures in sympathy with his own righteous- 
ness, to make them partakers of it, and cannot be fully 
satisfied with any other result. As it has been ex- 
pressed, " Righteousness in God is craving for right- 
eousness in man, with a craving which the realization 
of righteousness in man alone can satisfy." So also 
of holiness. In one view it repels the sinner, a*hd 
would banish him to outer darkness, because of its 
repugnance to sin. In another it is pained by the 
continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must 
desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So 
that the sinner, awakening to his own evil state, and 
saying to himself, " By sin I have destroyed myself ; 
is there yet hope for me in God ? " may hear an en- 
couraging answer, not only from the love and mercy 
of God, but also from his very righteousness and holi- 
ness. When he meditates on the character of the 
Lord his consolation will be, " Surely the Divine right- 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 325 

eousness desires to see me righteous — the Divine ho- 
liness desires to see me holy ; my continuing unright- 
eous and unholy is as grieving to God's righteousness 
and holiness as my misery through sin is to his pity 
and love ? " It is in such faiths as these, such glances 
upward to God, that the soul finds the only true re- 
storative. 

The result of all that has been said is this, that only 
in vital Christianity, or rather, to speak plainly, in God 
revealed in Christ, lies the adequate and all-sufficient 
moral motive power for man. For in Him thus re- 
vealed all the principles of man's composite nature find 
their object. The natural desire for happiness, the 
yearning of the affections, the moral needs of con- 
science, the aspiration to be perfect, all are satisfied. 
And these diverse principles so centered are turned into 
motive powers, or rather into one composite motive 
power, in which the lower, more self-regarding ele- 
ments, are gradually subordinated and absorbed by the 
higher. 

But you say, perhaps, that these things, if true, are 
things of faith, and morality stands on grounds of rea- 
son. Is it so ? Is it, then, certain that morality is in- 
dependent of faith ? To prefer an unseen duty because 
it is right, to a seen pleasure because it is pleasant, — 
what is this but an act of faith ? It requires faith to 
do the simplest moral act, if it is to be done morally. 
And the highest religious truths, if once they are appre- 
hended vitally and spiritually from within, and not 
merely taken passively on authority from without, will 
be found to require but an expansion of that same prin- 
ciple of faith by which, in its more elementary form, 
we realize the simplest moral truths. 

There can be no manner of doubt that the promise, 



326 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

" I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their 
minds will I write them," is the one great work which 
philosophy could not do, which the gospel has to some 
extent done. It has brought in that which moralists 
in vain sought after, and without which their schemes 
were vain — a living " virtue-making power." This 
was held forth as a hope in the Old Testament, " All 
my fresh springs are in thee ; " " In thy light shall we 
see light ; " " Then shall I run in the way of thy com- 
mandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart." 
When Christianity was first preached, it was in large 
measure fulfilled. To St. Paul and the first Christians 
the law became no longer a stern commandment, stand- 
ing outside of them, threatening them from above ; but 
a warm law of love within them — not only a higher 
discernment of the good, but a new and marvelous 
power to do it, cheerfully, and with joy. And down 
all the ages, whatever obscurations Christianity has un- 
dergone, this, the true apostolic succession, coming 
straight from the Divine Source to each individual re- 
cipient anew, has never failed. In such as Augustine, 
A Kempis, Luther, Pascal, Leighton, Fenelon, Henry 
Martyn, the pure and sacred fire has been relit from 
age to age. They, by what they were, and what they 
did, became, each to their generation, the renewers of a 
deeper, more substantive morality. For the Christian 
light in them was not a tradition or an orthodoxy, but 
a living flame, enlightening and warming themselves, 
and passing from them to others. And so to this day 
their works are storehouses of moral and spiritual 
quickening, more than all the books of all the moral- 
ists. When you read Leighton, for instance, you feel 
yourself breathing a spiritual air, compared with which 
the atmosphere of the moral systems is dull and de- 
pressing. For in Leighton, and such as he, morality 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 327 

is, as Mr. Arnold finely expresses it, " lighted up with 
the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the 
sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the 
ordinary man along it at all." The saintly Archbishop 
was speaking of what few have a right to speak of, but 
what he had seen and known when he said, " One 
glance of God, a touch of his love, will free and en- 
large the heart, so that it can deny all, and part with 
all, and make an entire renouncing of all to follow 
Him." Again, " It is in his power to do it for thee. 
He can stretch and expand thy straitened heart, can 
hoist and spread the sails within thee, and then carry 
thee on swiftly ; filling them, not with the vain air of 
men's applause, but with the sweet breathings and soft 
gales of his own Spirit, which carry it straight to the 
desired haven." 

This is the language of those who, like Leighton, 
have known most immediately, to use again his own 
words, " the sensible presence of God, and shining of 
his clear-discovered face on them." Perhaps ordinary 
men had better speak little of these things, they are 
so far beyond their experience. But language like 
this, because it has been often repeated as a mere hear- 
say by those who had no experience of it, has come to 
be regarded by many as merely a decorous tradition 
among religious people, which other men nauseate. 
Still, however overlaid it has been with words, and 
however remote from it most men must confess them- 
selves to be, the thing here spoken of remains none the 
less a reality — towards which end not only the relig- 
ious, but even the uprightly moral heart, must look 
and aspire. 

In the light of these thoughts regarding the spiritual 
springs of morality, how vain appears that cry so often 
heard in this day, " Give us Christian morality without 



328 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

the dogmas ! " In as far as any dogmas may be the 
mere creations of churches, or may be truths crusted 
over with human accretions, by all means let them be 
either swept away or purified. There is much need 
that all doctrines taught should be adjusted fittingly to 
the moral nature of men, so as, by manifestation of the 
truth, to commend themselves to every man's conscience 
in the sight of God. It is also true that as men ad- 
vance in spiritual insight, their view of doctrine be- 
comes more simple, more natural, more transparent 
with moral light. But still it is no less true that love 
to a transcendent object, to a living person, is the one 
root of Christian virtue, and that to expect Christian 
well-doing without a soul based on Christian faith, is to 
expect fruit from a tree which has no root. As was 
often said by one whose long life of Christian wisdom 
and love gave weight to his words : " Renan and oth- 
ers admire the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, 
but reject altogether the doctrines or transcendent 
truths of Christianity. They would divide the one 
from the other as with a knife, preserving this, throw- 
ing away that. Now only think of it in this way. 
Take that one precept, u Love your enemies, do good 
to them that hate you." How am I really to fulfill 
this ? If the law of my country gives me a command, 
bids me do this or not do that overt act, I can give it 
an outward mechanical obedience, and with this human 
law is satisfied. But the divine precept commands not 
an outward act, but an inward spiritual condition of 
being. How am I to attain to this ? By my force of 
will ? My will can rule my outward acts, but cannot 
change my inward dispositions. What shall avail to 
turn the whole tide of feeling, and change the natural 
hatred of enemies into love for them ? Nothing short 
of the forgiveness and the love of God in Christ to me 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 329 

and to all men felt to be a reality. This has power to 
change the natural hatred into a forgiving love. Noth- 
ing else can." This seems clear as demonstration. And 
in like manner it might be shown that there is not one 
Christian precept which has not its root, its motive 
spring, directly in some transcendent truth of God's 
nature, and of the soul's relation to Him. Deny these 
and the precepts fall. Vain, therefore, is the dream 
of a Christian morality without a true Christian theol- 
ogy supporting and inspiring it from beneath. 

But this tendency to seek the fruits of Christianity 
while rejecting its root, is as nothing compared with the 
extravagance of that modern system, which teaches that 
" the service of humanity " may be raised to the level of 
a practical and all-powerful moral motive, while all be- 
lief in a personal immortality and in the existence of 
God is denied, and a vague something, called the " spirit 
of humanity," is made the only object of worship. This 
strange persuasion has at this time its devotees, some of 
them men of great parts, and, I believe, of benevolent 
lives. That there should be some such — men pos- 
sessed by fanaticism for a creed which parodies Chris- 
tianity while it rejects it — is not more to be wondered 
at than any other form of fanaticism. The causes that 
have produced this strange phenomenon might not be 
difficult to find. But it is a thing to be wondered at 
that a cool-headed philosopher like Mr. Mill, who has 
never showed much tendency to fanaticism for this or 
any form of religion, should have thrown over it the 
shield of his patronage. Yet so it is. While professing 
that he entertains the strongest objections to M. Comte's 
system of politics and morals, he still thinks that that 
system has " superabundantly shown the possibility of 
giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid 
of a belief in Providence, both the psychological power 



330 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

and the social efficacy of a religion ; making it take 
hold of human life, and color all thought, feeling, and 
action, in a manner of which the greatest ascendancy 
ever exercised by any religion may be but a type and 
foretaste." Mr. Mill may have thrown all the more 
strength into this statement of opinion, that he was ad- 
vocating a mode of thought which he knew to be unpop- 
ular. For certainly it is one of his characteristics, that 
whether from the desire to help the weaker party, or 
from the love of paradox, he lQves to cut prejudice 
against the grain. Can it be that to the same reason is 
to be attributed that other strange statement of his, that 
the ideal of Christian morality is negative rather than 
positive, passive rather than active, abstinence from evil 
rather than energetic pursuit of good ? If this is not to 
be put down to the love of paradox, it is an instance of 
ignorance in a writer of high repute, to which it would 
be hard to find a parallel. To refute it there is no need 
to turn to the New Testament, though, if one did so, one 
should have to quote nearly the half of it ; neither need 
one point to the lives of the most eminent Christians, 
and the extent to which philanthropy purely Christian 
has changed the world. For a sufficient refutation I 
need only refer to a modern authoress, who plainly 
enough shows that she is as free as Mr. Mill is from any 
weakness for orthodoxy. In her essay on Christian 
Ethics, Miss Cobbe sets forth with great force how 
Christ changed the negative law of the Jews into a posi- 
tive, and thereby transformed the whole spirit of moral- 
ity, giving to men the being good, and doing good for 
their aim. And then she contrasts with this what she 
thinks the unmanly ethics of the modern churches, — 
the mere refraining from evil and leading harmless lives. 
But to return to Mr. Mill's assertion, that " the service 
of humanity " may probably be found to be a motive 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 331 

force as powerful, or even more powerful, than any 
hitherto known. Is it not a fact of history that it was 
Christ, who by his character, his teaching, his whole rev- 
elation, for the first time so enlarged men's narrow 
hearts as to make some of them at least conceive an uni- 
versal love for their kind ? How He did this we have 
partly seen already, and cannot dwell more on it now. 
Is it not also a fact of history, that since his sojourn on 
earth a new virtue, philanthropy, has come into being, 
and that of the great benefactors of mankind by far the 
largest number, and those the noblest and most self- 
denying, have been men who have confessed that they 
drew their inspirations to well-doing directly from Him ? 
Have these not declared that the power which enabled 
them to overcome natural shrinking, and to seek out 
their fallen fellow-creatures, even under the most un- 
lovely and revolting circumstances, was the simple faith 
that God and Christ have had pity on themselves, and 
on all men, even the most degraded ? This worth of 
human nature, the most degraded, in the eyes of Christ, 
has for his true followers invested it, even when most 
marred, with a new sacredness. In saying this it is no 
mere feeling or fancy I speak of, but one of the soberest, 
best attested facts. If for eighteen centuries this has 
been proved to be the strongest motive power in the 
breasts of great philanthropists, will men's devotion to 
the good of their kind become wider or more intense if 
you remove those beliefs which have hitherto fed it ? 
Permanent devotion to any object is exactly in propor- 
tion to the belief in the worth of that object. Will 
men's sense of the worth of the race be greater when 
you have removed from their minds all thought of an 
eternal destiny, and convinced them that their yearnings 
towards God are a delusion ? Would human life seem 
more lovely or more sublime, if you could take Christ 



332 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

out of the heart of the race, and obliterate all sense of 
the relation in which we stand to God ? Would the 
music of humanity sound more grand and deep if you 
could silence these, its tenderest, profoundest tones? 
Nothing that we know of the past or of the nature of 
things makes it in the least probable that by withdraw- 
ing what has hitherto proved the chief creative power of 
philanthropy, you will increase its volume. And if we 
are to wait till trial can be made of the new panacea, 
the suspense will be long, and the result disastrous to the 
best interests of mankind. It will, I suspect, require 
something more than the mere assertion of any philoso- 
pher to make sober-minded men hazard the experiment. 
Not to Christian morality, without the faith which 
underlies it, still less to the Comtean " service of 
humanity," can we look with hope for the moving force 
which shall make man fulfill his moral end. There is 
still another agency, which is so ably recommended that 
it must not be passed without a word. There are some 
at this day who look to Culture, taken in its largest 
sense, as the remedy for all our ills, the solvent to 
break the horny crust that hardens round men's hearts, 
the leavening power which shall transform all that is 
coarse, and low, and selfish into purity and light. Cul- 
ture, in this large sense, is made to include not only 
the usual intellectual and aesthetic elements, but also 
moral, and even religious ones. The aim, it is said, 
which the widest culture sets before itself, is to train 
man not only to an aesthetic but to a spiritual perfec- 
tion. And since man has religious needs, true culture 
will take account of these and set itself to supply them. 
Thus religion becomes a large ingredient in culture, — 
a means, perhaps the highest means, toward perfection, 
yet still a means. For culture, in its ideal of " a 
harmonious expansion of all the human powers," goes 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 333 

beyond religion and subordinates religion to itself. So 
conceived, culture, it is said, " adding to itself the re- 
ligious idea of a devout energy, is destined to transform 
and govern " religion. According to this view, culture 
is the end, religion but the means. 

There are, however, things which, because they are 
ultimate ends in themselves, refuse to be employed as 
means, and if attempted to be so employed, lose their 
essential character. Religion is one, and the foremost 
of these things. Obedience, conformity of the finite 
and the imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect 
will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an 
end in itself, the highest end which we can conceive. 
It cannot be sought as a means to an ulterior end with- 
out being at once destroyed. This is an end, or rather 
the end in itself, which culture and all other ends by 
right subserve. And here in culture, as we saw in 
pleasure, the great ethic law will be found to hold, that 
the abandoning of it as an end, in obedience to a higher, 
more supreme aim, is the very condition of securing it. 
Stretch the idea of culture and of the perfection it aims 
at wide as you will, you cannot, while you make it your 
last end, rise clear of the original self-reference that 
lies at its root ; this you cannot get rid of, unless you 
go out of culture, and beyond it, abandoning it as the 
end, and sinking it into what it really is, a means 
towards the perfection of human nature. No one ever 
really became beautiful by aiming at beauty. Beauty 
comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from 
sources deeper than itself. If culture, or rather the 
ends of culture, are to be healthy and natural growths, 
they must come unconsciously, as results of conformity 
to the will of God, sought not for any end but itself. 
On the other hand, culture, making its own idea of per- 
fection the end and religion the means, would degener- 



334 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

ate into an unhealthy artificial plant, open to the 
charges urged against it by its enemies. 

It cannot indeed be denied that these two, culture or 
the love of beauty, religion or the love of godliness, ap- 
pear in individuals, in races, in ages, as rival, often as 
conflicting forces. In themselves, and essentially, it 
cannot be that they are opposed ; but when either 
enters the human spirit, so absorbing is the attraction, 
that it for the most part casts out the other. The 
votary of beauty shrinks from religion as something 
stern and ungenial, the devout Puritan discards beauty 
as a seductive snare, and even those who have hearts 
susceptible of both, find that a practical crisis will come 
when a choice must be made whether of the two they 
will serve. The consciousness of this disunion has of 
late years been felt deeply in the most gifted minds. 
Painful often has the conflict been, when the natural 
love of beauty was leading one way, loyalty to that 
which is higher than beauty called another, and no 
practical escape was possible, except by the sacrifice of 
feelings which in themselves were innocent and beau- 
tiful. This discord has doubtless been intensified by 
the fact that ever since the Reformation men have 
taken the one or the other definite road, not dreaming 
that the two might be reconciled, or that it was desir- 
able to reconcile them. Only in recent times have we 
begun to feel strongly that both are good, that each 
without the other is so far imperfect, and that some 
reconciliation, if it were possible, is a thing to be de- 
sired. Violent has been the reaction which this new 
consciousness has created. In the recoil from what 
they call Puritanism, or religion without culture, many 
have given themselves up to culture without religion, 
or, at best, with a very diluted form of religion. They 
have set up for worship the golden calf of art, and 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 335 

danced round it to the pipe which the great Goethe 
played. They have promulgated what they call the 
gospel of art, — as Carlyle says, the windiest gospel 
ever yet preached, which never has saved and never 
will save any man from moral corruption. Not that 
way lies the true solution. It is but a vain attempt to 
build up culture on the denial of man's first and deepest 
need. That need is still what it ever has been, that 
his will be brought into contact with a Will higher, 
purer, stronger, than itself, on which it can hang, from 
which, as an ever-present " Personal Inspirer," it can 
draw all it needs of purifying strength. Set right by 
allegiance to the All-righteous Will, in dependence not 
in self-centered perfection, — in service not in culture, — 
in a higher self than itself, — the soul finds its true 
well-being. This centre once found — Christ as the 
life of individual hearts, as the cementing bond of all 
humanity — culture may be added without stint. In 
subservience to Him, used as an instrumentality in 
building up his kingdom, culture has a beneficent work 
to do. Apart from this, setting up for itself, it can 
never clear itself of the original taint of self-reference. 
But if it will understand its true calling to be the means 
not the end, the servant not the master, large service 
lies ready before it. To adjust the claims, and deter- 
mine the place of culture in reference to religion, is, I 
know, a hard problem ; and it were a useful work, for 
those who can, to help to adjust it. But the first con- 
dition of success is, that we recognize the true centre, 
and look for harmony by seeing the other elements 
held in their places by the force of the central attrac- 
tion. 

I have attempted to show how a new and more vital 
force is imported into morality, when we regard the ab- 
stract moral law of ethical science as absorbed into the 



336 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

All-righteous, All-loving Personal Will which Christian- 
ity reveals. In doing so I have touched, and that very 
imperfectly, I am well aware, but one side of a many- 
sided, indeed of an exhaustless problem. When man's 
natural moral sentiments are confronted with the Chris- 
tian revelation, many other questions arise, some of 
them more fundamental, though none perhaps more 
practical, than the one here discussed. Of these funda- 
mental inquiries one of the foremost is, how far man 
naturally possesses within himself certain moral senti- 
ments which serve as criteria by winch the truth of a 
revelation may be judged. On this grave question I 
cannot even enter at the close of this discussion. Only 
I would remark, that the moral nature in man must be 
that to which any objective religion, which claims to be 
universal, must mainly make its appeal. Else man has 
no internal standard at all by which to try any religion 
which claims to be received ; and on purely external 
grounds, it is conceivable that a religion, teaching im- 
morality, might have much to say for itself. Christian- 
ity, at first, though it came with external signs and 
wonders, yet rested its claim mainly on its adaptation to 
man's moral nature, and must do so more and more, as 
the moral perceptions it has itself quickened become 
deeper and purer. It must be so, if revelation be in- 
deed the appeal which God makes through facts of his- 
tory to the witness of Himself which He has left in con- 
science. In this view, Christian faith receiving revealed 
truth is the leaping up of like to like, the exile recog- 
nizing once more a voice from his home. 

The appeal to a power of judging in man is made in 
many different forms by our Lord Himself : " Why 
even of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " St. 
Paul, too, says that he strove in all he taught, to com- 
mend himself to every man's conscience. And the 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 337 

more either individuals or the race advance in spiritual 
intelligence, the more readily will they respond to this 
appeal in preference to all others. Morality and Chris- 
tianity have for eighteen centuries acted and reacted on 
each other, the outward truth quickening the inward 
perceptions, and these, when quickened, purifying men's 
apprehensions of the outward truth. And these two 
have become so interwoven that it is now impossible to 
separate them, and to say, this was drawn from the one 
source, and that from the other. Christianity, from the 
first, appealing partly to men's natural desire to escape 
from the dreaded consequences of sin, partly to the 
moral longings for righteousness, never wholly dead in 
the race, has, through this mingling of prudential and 
moral motives, elevated the best of mankind, and made 
their moral perceptions what they now are. And these 
moral perceptions, thus refined, react on the objective 
religion, and require ever more stringently that the 
truths presented by it shall be not moral only, that is, 
conformable to all that is best in man, but that they 
shall complement this, strengthen, elevate it. They re- 
quire not only that nothing which is un-moral shall be 
taught as true of God and his dealings with man, but 
that all which is taught concerning Him shall be in the 
highest conceivable degree righteous, shall be such as to 
lay hold of and to cherish whatever susceptibility of 
righteousness there is in man, and carry it on to perfec- 
tion. This is so obvious that it seems a truism. It is 
so readily assented to that no one would think of deny- 
ing it when stated in this general way. Yet it is pain- 
ful to think how much and how persistently it has often 
been lost sight of in popular religious teaching, and 
with how disastrous consequences. I am quite aware 
of the difficulties which this principle has to meet when 
turned to certain points in the elder and more rudimen- 
22 



338 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

tary forms of revelation. To solve these fairly would 
require a combination of moral and historical insight, 
with various kinds of knowledge, such as few possess. 
But when this principle is applied to the latest and 
completed revelation, Christianity can meet its require- 
ments in their most exacting form. If precept or truth 
can elevate, what height of morality can be conceived 
which shall go beyond such precepts as this : " Be ye 
perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect " ? or 
such announcements as these : " God is love ; " " God 
is light, and in Him is no darkness at all " ? Indeed, 
it is only when the inner moral eye has been clarified 
that the meaning of these statements comes out at all, 
and evermore as the moral nature rises these great 
truths rise above it infinitely. And if it be said that 
after all these are but general announcements, void of 
content, and we still need to know what perfection, 
light, love, are, then there remains our Lord's own life, 
with his teaching, actions, character, to fill these general 
words with living substance. 

It were well that those who have to teach religion 
should consider these matters more closely, — make a 
study more searching than is commonly made of what 
there is in moral man, — what this longs for, with what 
alone it will be satisfied. The most thoughtful teach- 
ers know this, know that for want of thus meeting the 
moral needs of men, — thus grappling with the higher 
moral side of questions, — there is danger lest the pur- 
est morality of modern time part company with the 
received religion. Men who are to teach cannot see 
too clearly or seize too firmly the distinction between 
that which is really moral and that which is merely 
prudential in man ; and though they may not alto- 
gether pass by motives drawn from ,the latter region, 
on the former mainly they must throw themselves, to it 



THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 339 

must be their chief appeal. They must cease to be 
content if they can raise men merely to the prudential 
level of a desire for safety, they must feel that their 
work is hardly begun till those they teach have come 
to desire righteousness for the love of itself. They 
must refuse to meet moral yearnings by un-moral doc- 
trines or expedients, — for bread giving men a stone. 
They must keep steadily before them that nothing can 
permanently satisfy the moral being in man, but some- 
thing not less, but more moral, more spiritual than it- 
self. They must feel themselves, and make others feel, 
that in the Divine economy, though there is much 
which is now dark and mysterious, there is nothing 
which is not supremely moral, and which will not at 
last be clearly seen to be so. In ceasing to use so ex- 
clusively the weapons of merely earthly, and wielding 
more confidently those of pure spiritual temper, they 
need not fear that the old armory of Christianity will 
fail them. In the old words, the old truths, the old 
facts, more vitally and spiritually apprehended, because 
brought closer to the moral heart of man, they will 
find all they need. This close contact between Chris- 
tian truths and the highest moral thought of the time, 
while it vitalizes and makes real the former, will react 
no less powerfully on the latter. There is no moral 
truth which is not deepened when seen in the light of 
God. That which, regarded from the side of man, is 
felt- merely as a yielding to his own sensual nature, 
when seen from the side of God becomes disobedience 
to a loving and righteous will to which he owes every- 
thing, and is deepened into a sense of sin. Character, 
which when regarded from a merely moral point of 
view almost inevitably becomes a building up from our 
own internal resources, takes altogether another aspect 
when it is seen that true character is in the last resort 



340 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 

determined by the attitude in which the spirit stands to 
God. Then it comes to be felt that the Tightness men 
search for cannot be self-evolved from within, that they 
must cease from attempting this, must go beyond self, 
must fall back on a simple receptivity, receiving the 
Tightness and the right-making power, which they have 
not in themselves, from out of the great reservoir of 
righteousness which is in God. Only on thus falling 
back on God, and feeling himself to be, as of every- 
thing else, so of righteousness, a recipient, is a man 
truly Tightened. Thus the last moral experience and 
the first upward look of religion agree in one, "A 
man can receive nothing except it be given him from 
above." 



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